Brands must strategise beyond sales or be left behind – Adewunmi
By Felicia Nwosu
Victoria Adewunmi, Managing Director of Watermark & Victoria, an experiential marketing agency, has brands and businesses to strategize beyond product selling by consistently designing and proactively delivering a quality customer-first experience that will keep consumers connected. She asserted that companies must pivot and adapt to solid business strategies or be left behind.
The experiential Amazon said this during a one-on-one chat with leading brand-centric, advertising and marketing magazine, MARKETING EDGE, where she stated that creating a customer experience by designing and delivering with the customer in mind enables consumers to stay connected as well as helps brands to remain on the crest of the radar, rather than focusing solely on sales.
“All of these are hinged on strategy. Another thing I think we have tried to do with our clients is to make them understand how important consumers are. For instance, in the past, we used to plan that activation would be attached to sales; almost every activation included tactical sales. We tried to let them understand that businesses that put sales first will most likely be left behind because consumers want experiences,” she said.
The advertising trailblazer urged brand managers to indulge in providing solutions by understanding the consumer’s perspective and using techniques that will appeal to the consumer in making decisions.
“Have you seen instances where a consumer can literally die for a brand? Where a consumer is stuck to a particular brand that they can’t just shift? What we have been able to do is to get them to understand that you will build your sales but you need to invest in equity, in those connections in people. They want to be the centre of connection. They also want a strong sense of belonging to the brands and some degree of loyalty,” she said.
Adewunmi, while mentioning some of the challenges faced by advertising professionals, explained that various sectors of the industry are confronted with the challenge of calculating return on investment.
“A major challenge that we can see and I think this is more industry perspective or specific, is not from the consumer angle. It is more from an industry angle. It is how you calculate the return on investment. For instance, when you do some ATL campaigns, you can calculate your ROI based on eyeballs, how many people saw the ad and all of that, but I think some brand managers struggle with getting a definitive way of calculating the ROI or the return of marketing spend executed in experiential,” she noted.
The cerebral professional and brand builder challenged brand custodians to be futuristic in their investment to enable them to aim for long-term growth.
“Your returns may not be immediate, you may not be able to say like the minute you spend this money, this is what you get. But over time, we are able to do assessments; we are able to do a lot of analytics with the infusion of technology into what we do. A couple of us are coming up with ways to show them the number,” she said.
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