Love bites!

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Romeo is known for his impressive connection to the emotion of love. His soliloquies to Juliet were bountiful, filled with engaging similes in an effort to ensure she recognized the depths of his passion. While Mrs. Browning offered numerous descriptive examples of how her love continued to swell.

Could it be, they were NOT romantics at all, but rather, were simply forced to extend themselves beyond human capacity?

To me, Romeo and Mrs. Browning were just as confused as most of us … early examples of the daunting challenge of defining something abstract.

In the businesses of marketing, a heavy emphasis of late is being placed on measuring all output. Corporation’s budgets are shrinking and scrutinized each penny intensely, and data is often the best defense for spending.

Even über CEO Jack Welch once uttered the famous quote, "I know half my advertising and public relations is crucial and working, I just don't know which half."

2007 and 2008 were the watershed years of the Ad industry. Consumerism was rampant, and so businesses were spending money to drive consumers to their stores and brands. Awareness was king.

Then we hit the skids with the financial meltdown, and the new "normal" is the economy we currently have. Marketer's now strive for tangible results and ROI, having to move towards performance media where there's a direct result and you can say, "we drove people to the store or to an e-commerce site.” Market share is now king.

What do you do when the communication vertical still doesn't have proper analytical tools? Or worse, focus is on the wrong determination?

Last week, we sat with a company that unanimously agreed on incorporating public relations into the mix. The hard to quantify measurable is important for their growth strategy, however, they simply couldn't determine at what degree the importance of “awareness” was. As such, we laid out a plan to tie our output to indicators essential to their business plans.

This simple strategy eliminated the nebulous interpreting of success. We made a "love connection."

So, in business or relationships, no matter if you "love" but are not "in love" or you "like" but don't really "like-like" or, if as Mrs. Browning suggests you will love deeper in death, I say it all works. As long as you and your recipient know what you really feel and agree on the key performance indicators.

Or, maybe Mrs. Browning realized it will take many lifetimes to fix this ...

Greg

Gregory Salsburg
CEO/The Big STIR
STIR-Communications
Miami | New York | London
c: (561) 386-8064
o: (305) 407-1723
e: Greg@STIR-Communications.com