Dear Tig: Building a Marketing Team, and Where To Find Reliable Direct Response Stats?
by Tig Tillinghast

** Tig's weekly column fields questions from and for marketers. **

Dear Tig,

How should I think about designing a marketing organization from scratch?

Regards, Starting Fresh

Dear Fresh,

This is a great challenge--one that most people don't ask about before they jump to set up a marketing department. To start, we need to answer several important questions:

How will the marketing group interface with the rest of the company? Will product managers run strategy, or will marketing run product development? What types of marketing efforts will be or become relevant (e.g., email marketing, print, online, PR, television, etc.)?

Also: What's the realistic level of consistent spending? (Lurches in spending can be handled by out-of-house resources.) How much and how often will out-of-house resources be employed? Given the company's culture, how accountable do you want marketing staff to be against ongoing results?

After you put some answers to these questions, you'll have a decent idea of the level of person you will want to head up the group. This will determine in good measure the ratio of strategy to execution the department will be able to handle.

You wouldn't want a project manager running strategic development, nor would you want such a person attempting to compete for attention and budgets against senior members of other company departments. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to waste the money for a senior expert when the majority of the work will be executing collateral materials.

If the budget is more than $500,000, it's quite likely that the marketing group will have diverse enough needs that efficiency of execution demands the help of an agency. It's impossible to get two or three in-house people to be expert in all things at once, so ad agencies often can fill expertise and execution voids.

Without this flexibility, it will be too tempting to spend the budget only on the things that the few staff feel comfortable running. This also allows a flexibility over time, allowing media mixes to mature along with the company.

Marketing groups can be structured either by function or in parallel to the company's product and division types. Marketing department organized around functions will often divvy themselves up into collateral, media, event, Web site and similar groupings.

Product-oriented departments will group into logical sets of product offerings, optimally geared around distinct audiences. For instance, a company might spread marketing resources between both a business-to-business channel and a consumer channel.

Large organizations will have to divide and subdivide audience types and marketing functions.

There really is no “right” answer, except to say that the only successful marketing departments are custom built around the quirks and personalities of the particular business.

Dear Tig,

As a marketing consultant, I am often asked by clients for research on response rates and cost per response among different direct response media. Are there any reliable, impartial studies available?

Thanks, DR Skeptic

Dear Skeptic,

The quick and cynical answer is no, there are no unbiased reports available. While there are plenty of good studies on the response rates for individual media, the studies that compare different media tend to be conducted with an ax to grind.

For information on individual media response rates, I contacted Michael Donnelly of One-to-One Interactive. He suggested we might look to David Hallerman over at eMarketer for email. McKinsey and Forrester also recently published one for online media. On the traditional side of things, the Direct Marketing Association has great information available.

It may indeed be possible to study the relative efficiencies of the various direct media for a given product, but the results would be reliable only for that product. Experience shows us that different positionings, audiences and even time periods can sway the results radically. Generic studies on the relative merits of different media tend to be sponsored by people with vested interests in the “winning” medium.

That said, a given client can and should experiment with the different media to see what works best for its own purposes. It helps to work with a firm like Donnelly's that has experience in all of them.