Real-World Examples
The lesson was driven deeply one year when I was doing the strategic planning for Clorox in Mexico. The brand manager put in a 15 percent growth target. I commented that, with 10 to 15 percent media inflation and less money than the previous year, it was going to be hard to meet that goal. “We just signed with Soriano (the largest supermarket chain in the northern part of Mexico) so we are getting about 20 percent more distribution,” he said. It wasn’t a slam dunk, but it showed me the importance of distribution.
So, what does this mean for media? Reac h .
And I’ve seen it proven time after time-the No. 1 way to increase share is to increase your reach. For DIRECTV, for example, after analyzing the 69,000 spots we bought in a year, the top conclusion was that spots that ran in stations with large audiences produced more calls/spot. Now, we did not find a straight correlation with ratings at all. None. A spot running anytime between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. in Univision would produce 20 to 25 calls on average. A spot in Azteca would produce eight to 10. A spot in Galavision would produce 12 to 14. Creative had a lot of influence, of course, but the ratios were there.
We also saw this reinforced whenever we were only in cable; calls would go down. We pulled the switch on broadcast and calls would go up. Univision would come in and calls would shoot up.
The theory that I formed after a while was that every spot reaches a wide-ranging audience that includes men, women, older, younger, and middle-aged. In that audience there would be people happy with their programming choices and others who were not happy. We would get the calls from the handful of people who were unhappy enough at that time that they were willing to change.
More to Come
This article is part one of a series on brand growth. In subsequent installments, we will explore other factors that influence this important business dynamic.
Additional articles by Marcelo Salup:
Two Guys Walk Into A Bar
In Advertising, Persistence Wins the Day
