Dubai: Advertising and marketing staff must be able to prove their value to a company's sales and profits and not just ask the boss to trust that what they are doing is good for business.
That was the message from author and former Coca-Cola Chief Marketing Officer Sergio Zyman in a speech in the second day of the 40th IAA World Congress.
Zyman, whose books include The End of Advertising As We Know It and The End of Marketing As We Know It told delegates that marketing and advertising were "selling more stuff to more people more often".
"Marketing is going to have to create growth. It cannot continue to be seen as an outlying function of the business.
"Everything that I've done in the soft drinks business has had to be measured in terms of its effect on the top line and the bottom line. Every single dollar has to be accounted for," he said.
Zyman said success in advertising and marketing was not about creating award-winning campaigns that consumers remembered.
These, he said, were often unsuccessful in terms of sales growth and some famous slogans or adverts had even resulted in dramatic sales declines.
"It's not about how much the campaign is liked, it's about how much it sells. When I was at Coca-Coca, there was a time when people were buying the advertising and loving the brand, but Pepsi was killing us.
"The best award is top line profit, top line sales. You have to measure instead of just saying: 'Trust Me,'" he said.
Zyman said he believed marketing was "a science" and that "spending on marketing will pay dividends".
"What's made me successful is to align myself to the business agenda. We all have to get much more scientific about how we do things," he said.
One key thing marketers had to focus on was separating their brand from the opposition, something which he said hotel group Ritz-Carlton and carmaker Lexus had been particularly successful at doing.
"Ritz-Carlton don't have anything really different from what everyone else offers it's just a hotel with rooms but they have been able to differentiate their product so that consumers feel that they have a different product," he said.
Also, he said companies should not look at demographics when deciding who to target their product at, instead they should target groups based upon their usage of a product.
"At Coca-Cola we decided to attack heavy users people who drank every day and as a result sales increased from 9 billion cases a year to 15 billion cases a year," he said.
