Twenty years on, Twittey's departure at the end of last year is indicative of a wider trend in the marketing communications landscape.
Sales promotion, as an added value incentive to buy, has been around forever. Some companies started life this way. Avon originally sold books door to door while offering phials of perfume as an incentive to buy. The perfume turned out to be more popular than the books and the rest, as they say, is history.
But from the mid seventies to the late eighties, sales promotion ruled the marketing communications roost and sales promotion agencies were masters of the universe. The reasons were simple.
Branding was great, but during a recession sales are what count. And the one thing sales promotion agencies could do was count, as a glance at their margins would confirm. Client companies succumbed to the siren voices of these agencies. 'We're accountable', 'Sales promotion delivers real bottom line value', 'Compared to media led advertising it's a no brainer.' And to a degree they were right.
Shrinking budgets combined with the growing power of the grocery multiples put real pressure on brand managers and, selectively applied, sales promotion delivered where it really counted, at point of sale. And sales promotion companies flourished.
KLP, Clarke Hooper and FKB floated. All declared their aim of building multinational, multi disciplined communications groups, and all failed – two went broke and the other sold to a French advertising group in the nick of time.
Others prospered. Individuals made small fortunes by selling to communications groups or even bigger fortunes by selling to increasingly desperate ad agencies that needed the expertise (and margins) that sales promotion could deliver. But all good things come to an end.
Some successful standalone 'promotional marketing' companies still exist, some making good money, some even doing a moderately good job for their clients.
Seen as the marketing alchemist's stone in those earlier, headier, simpler days, sales promotion is now just part of, not the whole solution. Which begs the question, "is there any single solution?"
Clients might like to think so as, increasingly desperate to gain the slightest competitive edge, they grasp at straws. As such new marketing tricks and disciplines – think digital – rise nova like then fall to their true level within the new 'integrated' marketing landscape.
The mass of information, media and choices available today means the true answer lies in an overall understanding of the marketing options available and a blending of these choices into an integrated approach and offer. Integration not specialisation is now the name of the game.
Triangle was the leading independent UK sales promotion consultancy, bought for several million pounds in 2001 by Publicis. Today, post earn out, with Twittey gone, Triangle will be absorbed into an outpost of the Publicis Empire.
While the eighties might be set for a revival don't expect marketing communications to follow suit. Every dog has its day and the (standalone) sales promotion consultancy has had its.
Graham Green, chairman of Meerkat Marketing Communications.
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