Attention No-one! Have I got a brand unavailable for you!

Publication: Business Brief
Author: John Bowles
Date: 2011-11-29

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In a R30 billion plus industry, the average South African is bombarded by advertising. Some of its good, some of its bad, some we take (a little) notice of, while some annoy or irritate and some of it helps us in our lives.

While a lot of time is spent on the creativity, does anyone question how much time is being spent on making sure the message is sent to where the advertised brands are actually physically ‘grab-it-in-your-hands-and-go’ available?

Often marketers are so focused on mental availability that they sometimes forget that the brand, the service, the retailer or the advertiser kind of needs to be physically available too. Advertisers can screw it up when it comes to the physical availability issue with their mental support.

We know that the aim of marketing is for your brand to be thought of in a buying situation. Simple awareness is ok, but let’s face it – it can often be completely irrelevant and expensive. I am very aware of Tampax but probably mostly am never going to be thinking of Tampax in a buying situation.

Much of the advertising budget is often spent reaching consumers that are not category buyers. So even though there is physical availability supporting the mental campaign, the message is wasted because they’re not going to consider and certainly not buy.

On the other side of the coin, we live in a country where there is massive social and economic inequality. When I last checked, less than 12% of the population holds over 80% of personal income wealth in the country. Yet, most advertising that goes out is broad and doesn’t take this factor into consideration. For example, only 30% of taxpayers represent 80% of the SARS personal income tax revenue. We’re talking a really small group of people that the government could probably telephone over two weeks with their reminders.

But when SARS communicates, they send messages to everyone. What a waste! Everyone’s aware of them but surely we should only be targeting the taxpayers?

Many advertisers are guilty of the mental availability overload but seem to pat it off the shoulder as an ‘awareness’ objective exercise. More like an extravagant waste – and in the case of SARS, it’s at the taxpayer’s expense.

Media planning communication should match the footprint of physical availability and crucially, should be aimed at the maximum number of category buyers within those footprints.

If 12.5% of your market share or sales comes from Limpopo, is 12.5% of your communication budget supporting it? And within Limpopo, is all of it focused on Polokwane? Are 20% of your Limpopo’s share from Tzaneen and is anything covering them? What about Musina, Bela-Bela? These are all important hotspots where brands, services, retailers are physically visible and available but lacking in mental reminders to say “Hey remember me, I’m here, waiting…”

The powerhouse provinces like Gauteng often get the most communication support. Of course they should, but when you look within the metros at key economic goldmines like Tshwane (Pretoria) and Ekurhuleni (East Rand) the same lack of mental communication support is visible. When I have spoken to leading retailers in the country, they all tell me the same thing. These two areas are in their top five performing store areas. But are they getting ‘top five’ mental availability on the ground? I don’t think so – certainly not in the print media.

Physical and mental availability of brands and services are the key to any business’s success. If this is the case and the role of marketing is to be thought of in a buying situation, then supporting the stocks on shelf or the services on offer to those that live around these points must be paramount. With tight budgets, lack of resources, nightmare competition and better priced alternatives, you need to give the brand a chance. That means reaching your category buyers when they are thinking of buying and reaching them where they live. That should be the first step before creative execution kicks in – because, these geographic markets are all quite different from one another! But that’s another series of articles…

I can already hear the guns loading in creative and media departments around the country. I’m hoping this article has the same geographic spread as the ‘mass’ media – then I’ll be ‘A OK’.

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