The joy of marketing

What is the right collective noun for a group of marketing people?

I pose the question having spent an enjoyable day with ALVA (the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions) at their annual conference, a gathering mostly comprised of representatives of the marketing teams of the afore-mentioned venues.

Collective nouns fascinate me – my favourite examples include:

• A corps of anatomists
• A conjunction of grammarians
• A clique of photographers
• An aggregate of geologists
• A brace of orthodontists
• etc

So, what is the bond that binds marketing people? Does it give me a clue for their rightful collective noun? They are certainly an extremely positive bunch.  That is pretty much a requirement of the job.  In that respect, they represent a complete opposite to my own profession, in which appreciation of risk (ok, outright pessimism) is an invaluable attribute. So it is probably natural that I would feel slightly bemused having spent significant time in their company.

I am probably not on my own – I can fully understand Sir Alan Sugar’s perspective on marketing (“I've written books on advertising... cheque books”).  Yet, before I choose a collective noun, I have to accept that this is a year in which “they” have been right and I have been completely wrong.

I thought, given the economic backdrop, that 2009 would be a year of retreat for visitor attractions. Short term, it clearly wasn’t so.  More than 3/4 of ALVA members reported growth in 2009 and almost all of that was done with reduced marketing budgets.  The only significant falls come from known external factors – some Liverpool attractions have seen falls from a 2008 high driven by their status as European City of Culture.  “Stay-cation” was one of the buzzwords though, as Alan Love from BDRC pointed out, it has been less a question of people cancelling treks abroad and booking weeks in Scarborough, and more a question of people not holidaying at all – instead taking more local days out. I didn’t expect that so, there it is, I was wrong. I am one of a “sum” of accountants (not a “snooze” of accountants, as one unkind soul suggested…) who were too pessimistic.

To a last man/woman, our marketing rivals see only a possibility of growth next year. Can this be true? I would estimate that the average impact of stay-cation has been +15% this year. That seems to be a fair consensus and means that, if an attraction did less than that, they underperformed.  The marketing team for anyone who did more than that deserves credit.

But will stay-cation endure? There seem to be three possibilities:

1. life gets worse.  People stop going out.  Stay-cation dies.
2. life gets better.  People go to find the sun.  Stay-cation dies. (but we may make up some visitors elsewhere)
3. life stays where it is. People do the same things.  Stay-cation lives.  Hurray! (but no further growth)

I could bore you all (unless you are part of the snooze) on the reasons why things might well get worse out there in the greater economy.  But, you’re lucky – I don’t have to. I only have to point out that, as with 2009, there is a measurable risk of either points 1 or 2 happening. If either one happens, we have to brace ourselves for a dramatic downturn in visitor numbers and any marketing plans (indeed any expenditure plans) should be built to recognise that possibility. 

Listening to the folks at the ALVA conference, this was clearly not the case, with the exception of the publicly-funded museums where the economic dynamic is different (free entry for all but the prospect of the government axe falling on their expenditure budgets means that they have to contemplate what they would do with cuts of 10% or more).

So, should my chosen collective noun for marketing people recognise “short-sightedness”? (A blur of marketers?)Well, that would be a bit daft of me given my predictive accuracy of the last year.    People in glass houses etc.

It was notable that the biggest murmur of appreciation came when the National Trust’s  successful decision to ramp up marketing spend in 2009 was highlighted as if it was the model for all of us. Get real! They have a very different attitude to risk from the rest of us for very good reason.  A single bad decision on marketing (or anything frankly) is not going to bankrupt NT.  Or result in enforced redundancies.  That simply isn’t the case for the rest of us. They will have been incredibly rigorous in their decision-making process but their risk profile is just different.

There was clearly a yearning to follow NT’s path, balanced by a knowledge that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

Realism? Well, maybe.  No-one was really going to change their marketing strategy (ourselves included) for next year – there was a feeling that “it” had worked very well. But what if the year’s success really did come down to a stay-cation phenomenon? In that sense, we have not been successful at all.  It is one thing to take share from a static market (good marketing); it is another to simply drift up in a growing market (wasted marketing).

No-one wanted to talk about this.  Like I said, everyone sees only growth next year. So, optimism does seem to be the enduring trait amongst marketing people.

As, I have to say, is talking.  A “gaggle” maybe?

Having said that, looking at our own excellent team (Hannah Payne, Victoria Bellamy and Ulrika Ericson who have achieved 50% growth this year!!! Eat that, NT) are a distinctly sociable bunch so perhaps I should settle on a “bevy” of marketers. That would apply quite fairly to the lovely bunch at ALVA, who in the tradition of all marketers enjoyed the celebratory wine put out for lunch at the conference….. Tell me you didn’t see that pun coming.

Still, I’ve learnt my lesson from last year and from now on I refuse to be too negative:

All copyrights acknowledged and please do go to the Dilbert website for more of these!

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