Are brands better with less...and a little more skin?

Why is it that when I look at the media strategies for big brands I often feel as if they haven't gone beyond "what we've always done" + "the web". And when I speak to small to medium businesses they can go from one extreme to the other from innovative to old-fashioned, but never just thinking - ok, what TARP weights and frequency do I need to hit to have a high likelihood of success? And to impress our retail buyer?

Which makes me wonder - would big brands actually do better with less?

Smaller businesses feel the impact of their activities immediately, and therefore test and measure faster and with more direct customer feedback than some of the big brands. This is done with less time and dollars, forcing creativity.

One of the key differences is immediacy...having some skin.

They literally have skin in the game, unprotected by layers of budgets and departments for dispersal of impact.It is sense checking not just with sales dollars, but relevance to customers and impacts on perceptions at the same time.

So, would a big brand do better with less dollars, but more skin in the game?

There are many ways to make this happen, even when you work on some of the biggest brands!

• Make a case for a proportion of the promotional budget to be experimental - including allocated people time to support that experimentation!
• Figure out what skin is for you - is it spending an hour a week on the customer service lines, venturing into online conversations, hosting a customer party or walking the supermarket floor with your buyer?
  
• Is there a way you can do fast, small tests for promotional ideas - and keep them coming? Try giving free hot chocolates as people are waiting for public transport in the cold, negotiate directly with a friendly store manager to test some new point of sale...how can you test, now?

This is not suggesting strategic planning gets scrapped, it is about planning for flexibility and putting in place methods for low cost testing to increase the overall effectiveness of execution - and acting like it is your skin in the game.

Flickr photo credit: Brandon Schaefer