As consumers seek to cut back their spending in the current economic downturn, the need for food and drink companies to measure the effectiveness of marketing expenditure is increasingly critical. “The pressure on marketers to show the return on investment has significantly increased” according to Gordon Mowat, partner with McKinsey & Company. Speaking at Bord Bia’s Brand Forum event in the RDS last night Mr. Mowat said “marketers today must prove the effectiveness of their marketing spend or they’ll lose it.”
The Bord Bia event themed ‘Justifying and Maximising Marketing Spend’ attracted over 100 representatives from the Irish food, drink and horticulture industry. Conor Kilduff, Marketing Director, Unilever Ireland also presented at the event. According to Mr. Kilduff “As one of Ireland’s leading consumer goods companies, of course we can justify marketing investment. The question is how we continue to do so and how we can continue to invest as effectively as possible today and into the future”.
Speaking at the event, John Noonan, Marketing Director of Flahavan’s and Chairman of the Brand Forum Steering Group said “The business environment has seen dramatic change in the past six months and the marketing function is experiencing considerable pressure on budgets. In this context, demonstrating marketing's return on investment is consistently one of the biggest issues faced by marketing executives. No topic has more immediacy for marketers and brand managers than monitoring spend and improving its effectiveness.”
“It is important that we effectively measure what we do and directly connect marketing investment and improvements in brand equity to long term growth in profitability” he added.
Gordon Mowat, partner with McKinsey & Company commented “Some key interventions to maximise marketing return on investment include allocating resources to the highest potential brands and channels; taking a broad view of how to invest funds – not just in traditional marketing, but also in-store, packaging, and even product and pricing and keeping production and media budget costs to a minimum”.
Bord Bia’s Brand Forum provides practical advice and assistance to Irish food, drink and horticulture companies through email alerts; quarterly meetings; publications; customised brand services and workshops. Member companies range in size and profile from multinationals to small enterprises. The brand programme is driven by a steering group and is chaired by John Noonan, Marketing Director of Flahavan’s.
Speaker’s biographies
Gordon Mowat, Partner, McKinseys & Company
Gordon Mowat is a partner in the London office. He has over thirteen years sales and marketing experience, with extensive experience serving consumer goods companies on many aspects of corporate strategy, business unit strategy, customer management, marketing and operations. Prior to joining McKinsey’s he worked as a Brand Manager and Sales Manager at Procter & Gamble.
McKinseys is a global management consultancy firm. Seventy five years in business, McKinseys is one of the world’s best known professional services firms. McKinseys mission is to “help clients make distinctive, lasting and substantial improvements in their performance and to build a great firm that is able to attract, develop, excite and retain exceptional people”.
Conor Kilduff, Marketing Director, Unilever Ireland
In January 2008, Conor became marketing director for the entire Unilever portfolio in Ireland (foods, ice cream and home and personal care products). Prior to that, he was business unit director for the foods portfolio since 2004. In 2001, he became a director of the Unilever Board in Ireland.
Unilever Ireland is a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever Plc and is responsible for the selling of a portfolio of leading food and home and personal care brands. Unilever Ireland’s portfolio includes brands such as HB ice cream, Knorr, Lyons tea, Flora, Hellmann’s, Persil, Surf, Domestos, Dove and Lynx. The company employees 300 people and a group turnover for 2006 was €346 million.