A high profile marketing mainstay was recently dropped by a well-known brand. Hawaiian Tropic has officially retired their famous bikini pageants. Considering Hawaiian Tropic’s target customer, this move was a long time coming. Even without detailed purchase information, it’s reasonable to guess that the majority of people purchasing suntan lotion are women in the 20-45 age range. How many of these women are big fans of bikini pageants?
This story got us thinking: Why do brands often wait so long to change when something is broken? Because an event is popular? Because they’ve always done it that way? Because they’re celebrating a significant milestone (5 years, 10 years, etc.)? None of these are good reasons, but we’ve heard them all. We’ve also seen brands make seemingly arbitrary changes to investments that are performing flawlessly.
Rather than go on soft measures, we suggest you review the following objective factors whenever you consider changing or adding a high profile investment to your marketing portfolio:
Does this investment meet the needs of our target customer? How does it do so better than others?
Does the investment dramatically illustrate or relate to the promise that the brand stands for?
Is it in keeping with the brand character, and does it communicate the essence of the brand?
Does it illustrate our differentiation from our key competitors?
If asked, can I prove that this investment achieves my goals?
It’s never easy to make these decisions. Our advice is to regularly evaluate the value of your marketing investments against key metrics that align with your business goals. If you need help understanding how to set up the right metrics and measures, please contact us. If Hawaiian Tropic had done such a regular and consistent assessment, we’re pretty confident their bikini pageants would have been gone long before 2013.