Shape The Future helps marketers measure up and prove their worth with special Recession Busting Plan

Figures show that over 60% of marketers surveyed 'don't know how' or are 'too busy' to monitor what their customers think

28th January 20089:  Today, the latest figures announced from Shape the Future’s survey, into 1,500 UK businesses’ marketing intentions, show that 2/3 of businesses do not have a reliable way of measuring customer satisfaction other than monitoring sales figures. The statistics clearly show that 19.8 percent of those surveyed do not measure the effectiveness of their marketing. Reasons cited: “Too busy” (38.9 percent) and “don’t know how” (33.6 percent). Businesses are relying on customers telling them what they think, which This means that if customers are going elsewhere marketers likely won’t know why. It also suggests that companies don’t understand enough about their client needs until it is too late.

Historically, marketing budgets are one of the first victims of an economic downturn. Therefore, Shape the Future urges marketing practitioners to be super alert and demonstrably valuable to those in charge of the HR head count by ensuring that they know what customers are thinking and the most effective way of marketing to them to maximise loyalty and market share. This is especially important as other recent statistics * predict that 81 per cent of cuts in the private sector will be compulsory.

During the 1991 downturn, 10 percent of UK marketing directors were made redundant. In 1991 and 1992, 14 percent of marketers lost their jobs and an average of 1,200 businesses went under every week. Shape the Future has come up with a six point recession busting plan based on understanding customers’ needs and behaviour.  Shape your own future with this marketing focussed Recession Survival Plan

AccordingAccording to Businesses seem to know what they want to spend money on. Shape the Future’s latest survey results show, that promotion activities most likely to receive a portion of the marketing budget over the next 12 months are:

•   Websites (25.1 percent are planning to increase their spend here)
•   PR (11.9 percent)
•   Networking and Website Optimisation (SEO) (19.7 percent of the sample)

Despite this, 1/5 of companies still do not measure marketing effectiveness at all. This means they don’t know what’s working and what’s not.  Worse still, very few do much more than lead tracking and asking new customers where they had first heard of them.

The trick is to know exactly what existing and potential customers want, and more importantly, what they don’t want.

Peter Martin, MD at Shape the Future advises: “Businesses in the current climate simply can’t afford not to know what's going on, who is giving the best performance or where the next sale could come from. By measuring project marketing ROIreturn on investment, as well as employee ROI, businesses will be better able to better prioritise spending rather than seeing precious budgets disappear into a black hole with no way of knowing whether they have been used effectively. 

“Relying on anecdote or guesswork simply won’t work and is completely unnecessary - it’s now possible to get the answers to these issues very affordably and cheaply, which can be enourmously helpful in these difficult times.”

•   Today, total redundancies are up 101,000 on last year according to the Office of National Statistics. This is the highest figure since comparable records began in 1995.

* The CIPD/KPMG Labour Market Outlook