Professor Merlin Stone explores exciting but challenging and changing times of the ‘marketing director’.
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Category: Europe
David Cole (pictured), MD of online research company fast.MAP, analyses French and English data from a new GMA survey.
Maybe it’s because we’re an island race that the British have parochial online buying habits. The French, for example, are twice as likely to buy sans frontiers.
But new research reveals it’s the British aversion to foreign languages which is a more likely cause.
In mid-February, the GMA commissioned fast.MAP to ask panels of 550 French and 1,120 UK adults (each panel demographically representative of the country) about their online buying habits.
While both nations have enthusiastically embraced online purchase, the French are far more likely to buy from other countries – probably because they are also twice as likely to speak the language. Click here to view/download the chart.
While almost half of the French online buyers (47%) made cross-border purchases in the last year, in the UK only a quarter (22%) did so. Of these, 31% of the French, but only 17% of the British spoke the language of the country they bought from.
Two in 5 French buyers (38%) and 7 in 10 of the British (70%) bought these imported goods from a website translated into their own language, showing the importance of investment in multi-language website options to companies wishing to tap into foreign markets (especially those wishing to sell into the UK). Click here for the chart.
The French were also twice as likely to use – and have no problem using – online translation software (13% v 6%). And although twice as many of the French encountered problems using this software (5% v 2%), this is as expected since twice as many were using them.
The French were also twice as likely to enlist the aid of a bilingual friend (4% v 2%), but only one in 100 of either nationality was helped linguistically by the company they were buying from.
The French are to be congratulated on their persistence, since 8% of those who experienced language problems managed to complete the transactions compared with only 3% of the British.
French cross-border buyers are also far more open to a wide variety of sourcing routes than the British. Fewer than 1 in 10 British buyers use a wide mix of multi-national sourcing methods, while the French are more than twice as likely to use several.
In fact, the British seldom stray outside of four main sourcing channels – auction site; search engine; company website; and email. This implies that for those selling into the UK, concentration on these media would be cost-effective, while those selling into France would be wise to consider a wider mix of promotional media. (Chart )
Two in 5 UK buyers heard about foreign goods and services via auction sites (UK 39%; F17%). The second largest UK influence search engines, was by far the most important source route in France (UK 36%; 49% F).
Second most prevalent in France was company websites (F 27%: UK 23%) followed by email (F 26%; UK 16%), while 22% of French and 7% of British buyers of foreign goods used comparison websites.
Between one and two in ten French buyers also used: comparison websites (22%); online ads (13%); social network sites (13%); TV and radio ads (12%); print ads (10%); and exhibitions (9%).
To download a variety of fast.MAP/ DMA/ IPM/ IoF annual marketing/ fundraising tracking studies, click here.
Account directors earning $125k (£75k)-plus up 45%, creative directors command 41% more in North America versus Europe, technical architects
wanted worldwide, says report.
Competition for talent at digital agencies and production companies is leading to sharp salary rises and remuneration gaps of up to 45% between some regions.
Globally, there’s never been a better time to be in the three most sought-after digital roles: account director, creative director, and technical architect. Senior-level strategists and user-experience leads also command strong salaries, although these vary according to where they live.
These are key findings the annual Salary Report by SoDA, the invitation-only organisation that represents top digital agencies and elite production companies worldwide.
The number of account directors earning more than $125k (£75k) increased by 45% between 2012 and 2013; while creative directors commanded up to 41% higher salaries in North America compared with their European peers.
Last year, the average salary for technical architects in North America was between $101-$110k (£60-65k) compared with $91-$100k (£54-59k) in Europe and Australia. The result suggests uniform global demand for this area of expertise, particularly in light of the sometimes significant salary gaps between these regions for other roles.
The SoDA Salary Report underscores a significant – and in some cases widening – salary divide between regions such as Europe and North America. In Europe, average salaries for project managers, creative directors, producers, graphic designers and copywriters stagnated last year as the cost of living rose.
While salaries for some of these positions in North America were also stagnant, they were, on average, 42% higher than salaries in Europe. This fact could lead to some top talent exploring expat opportunities.
The SoDA Salary Report also reveals:
- Account directors earned 11% more on average last year compared with 2012.
- Creative directors’ salaries rose by eight per cent, the most common salary range in 2013 was between $126-$150k (£75-90k).
- Unlike some corporate sectors where CEO pay has risen significantly, compensation for CEOs and managing partners in the study actually dipped 16% in 2013, from $200-250k (£120-150k) on average in 2012, to $176-200k (£105-120k)in 2013. This decline can partly be explained by a shift towards incentive-based pay (not captured in the study’s baseline salary figures).
- SoDA’s findings also suggest that top executives are shouldering some of the burden associated with tough economic times, in order to maintain or increase the salaries of key talent.
North/South America highlights
Overall, the highest salaries are paid in North America, with some roles such as account managers ($91-$100k or £54-59k) and social media directors ($101-110k or £60-65k) standing out. This contrasts with Europe and Australia where account managers earned between $61-$70k (£36-41k) and $51-$60k (£30-35k) in Latin America.
Salaries for top digital talent in Brazil remain above the rest of Latin America for many positions such as executive creative director, senior graphic designer, copywriter and front-end developer. But the gap is beginning to narrow given the economic strength of other markets in the region, such as Colombia.
Last year a senior Latin American producer could command between $41-$50k (£24-29k) compared with $71-$80k (£42-48k)in the UK and $101-$110k (£60-65k) in New York.
Europe highlights
Creative directors earned $126-$150k (£75-90k) in North America compared with $91-$100k (£54-59k) in Europe, $61-$70k (£36-41k) in Latin America and $111-$125k (£66-74k) in Australia.
While salaries for most key positions in Europe stagnated in 2013, the role of technical architect bucked that trend, rising more than 100% last year. APAC highlights
The Australian bull run of salaries in 2012 abated in 2013, with pay for producers, creative directors, graphic designers and copywriters declining last year.
Median pay for Australian executive creative directors fell from between $176-$200k (£105-120k) to $126-$150k (£75-90k)– the same as Europe. This reflects tightening margins on the continent, increased competition, with clients cautious over the direction of the economy keeping control of budgets.
Chris Buettner, SoDA’s executive director, said: “On a global level, most salaries analysed by SoDA were either stable or slightly up on 2013, despite the slow economic recovery in many regions. One of the reasons is that the world’s leading digital agencies and production companies are fighting hard to keep top talent from jumping ship to start-ups that offer high salaries and promise a golden lottery ticket.
“SoDA’s international growth over the past year has allowed us to segment the response data in more ways than ever before. In this year’s Salary Survey we are seeing pockets of salary inflation due to global demand for top talent in areas such as design, user experience, strategy and technical architecture.”
A major census has revealed that the door drop channel is continuing to see recovery across Europe and the UK and it remains a highly effective tool for marketers
The European Letterbox Marketing Association (ELMA) has published its third pan-European census of door drop media covering 22 markets and 180m households. The research found that the door drop market in Europe continued to recover from the recession with an increase of 2.2 per cent to 115 billion items in 2012. However, pressure on costs resulted in media spend falling marginally to €3.9bn; a decrease of 0.7 per cent compared to 2011.
Croatia was the only country to see an increase in the average number of door drops from 7 to 8 per week. The large economies of France, Germany and UK (244m items) all increased use of door drop, balancing the stabilisation and slight decline of volumes in the CEE and Scandinavian markets. UK households receive 5 door drops per week.
The largest volumes by country in 2012 continued to be Germany (23,300,000,000 million), France (21,177,000,000 million), Italy (12,000,000,000 million) and The Netherlands (11,020,000,000 million). The UK is ranked fifth with 7,214,000,000.
In a new development for the ELMA census, it looked at spend on door drop as a percentage of total advertising spend. The Nordic region, on the whole, allocates more spending to door drops with Denmark at 15%, followed by Finland (11%), France (9.6%) and Norway (8.1%). The lowest advertising spend on door drops is in the UK (1.5%), followed by Poland (1.8%) and Germany (2.0%).
Households in The Netherlands continue a three year trend of receiving the highest number of door drop items in Europe, although this fell by one to 35. Considerable distance remains between the highest and lowest users of door drop with Irish and Romanian households continuing to receive two, despite media spend on the medium rising in Ireland in the past year. The average number of items received by households across Europe remains 12.
Commenting on the research findings, Mark Davies, ELMA president and managing director of TNT Post DoorDrop Media UK, said: “The ELMA census confirms that the door drop sector in Europe has recovered from the recession but is experiencing pressure on price despite a welcome increase in volume.
“Our new data highlighting spend on door drops as a percentage of total advertising spend is illuminating and shows that the sector has to work hard to make its argument for a fair share of the advertising budget.
“Recent research from Experian, where 52% of household decision makers said door drops were the most important source of research about their purchases, followed by the internet at 24%, shows that door drop remains an, if not the most, effective tool for marketeers. It is our job to re-educate marketeers across Europe of the effectiveness and cost benefit of using door drops.”
ELMA represents the leading Pan-European distributors of print media, such as leaflets, flyers, catalogues, brochures, free newspapers and product samples. More than 130,000 people work for the companies within ELMA of which the vast majority are distributors. The aim of the association is to guarantee quality standards of member operations and promote the door drop channel.
New research reveals that consumers’ patience has, in some cases, truncated from 10 days to 10 minutes in the space of a generation. It also shows
that men are generally more impatient than women.
Omnibus research commissioned by customer service specialists KANA Software reveals that the proliferation of digital devices and social networks has transformed British consumers’ tolerance of waiting times. What KANA calls the ‘expectation reflex’ has truncated, in a generation, responses measured in working days to a matter of minutes.
David Moody, head of worldwide product strategy at KANA, said: “Little more than a decade ago, 10 working days was the conventional commitment of businesses and organisations when responding to complaints; and also the span of consumer tolerance. This no longer applies.”
KANA asked a statistically representative sample of UK adults how frequently they checked for communication responses on their devices.
The key findings:
- Men are generally more impatient than women. Men will check a device for responses on average every 22 minutes, 30 seconds. Women will check every 26 minutes, 15 seconds.
- The 65+ age group checks devices more frequently than the 45-64-year-old group, reflecting the time they have available and their newly developed digital capabilities. This suggests digitally enabled pensioners will become the prolific and demanding complainants within five years.
- One-fifth of all social media users will check for a response at least once an hour, with one in 20 checking every 10 minutes or more.
The most frequently checked devices across all age groups:
- Email on smartphone – every 36 minutes
- Checking Twitter for replies – every 39 minutes
- Checking phones for texts – every 48 minutes
- Checking for missed calls – every 49.25 minutes
- Checking PC or laptop for email – every 54 minutes
- Checking Facebook for messages – every 57 minutes
- Checking voicemail – every 1 hour, 5 minutes
The frequency by age with which consumers check for responses on any device:
- 18-24: Every 9 minutes, 50 seconds
- 25-34: Every 9 minutes, 55 seconds
- 35-44: Every 21 minutes
- 45-54: Every 36 minutes
- 65-plus: Every 47 minutes
- 55-64: Every 1 hour, 30 minutes
KANA’s David Moody said: “In the past 10 years, organisations have lost the ‘time shield’ previously offered by postal services. The sense that a letter was on a journey and could be anywhere between the sender and the recipient has been lost. Our impression today is that as soon as we press send, ‘Mr or Ms Cosgrove in Complaints’ should be reading our complaint and working out how to respond. If we don’t hear back quickly, our impatience rises.”
He added: “Public-facing organisations have to recognise the adoption of social channels is truncating customer service processes. With smartphones acting as digital umbilical cords, the modern consumer is always connected. Unfortunately for service desks, ‘working days’ are an outdated concept.”
“Running a customer service operation is as complex as running air traffic control. Reductions in consumer tolerance can and should be met with a level of service that meets revised expectation. The technology already exists to support organisations that wish to monitor all channels and deal with queries and complaints in a rapid and personal fashion. Companies that don’t adjust their processes in the age of the adept digital consumer will be the losers.”
Additional findings
KANA’s polling also found that the average UK consumer has routinely used more than seven digital communication channels in the past year, challenging most customer-facing businesses. The explosion of social media platforms targeted at consumers in the past 10 years and ease of adoption are creating headaches for businesses as more consumers take to social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to seek help and air their grievances about poor service.
The average UK adult spends a ‘fraughtnight’ — or nearly two weeks — each year waiting for service, making complaints and using digital channels to direct their ire at companies that provide poor service.
The average UK consumer has used 7.4 channels of electronic communication in the past six months. Among18-to-24-year-olds, this figure rises to 8.4 channels. The figure is lowest in the 65+ age bracket, but even this age band uses 6.2 methods of electronic communication.
The poll found that an astonishing two weeks each year – equivalent to the amount of time typically taken for a summer holiday – are lost by every adult simply trying to get the service they need or expect from private and public sector organisations.
Marketing and PR professionals among the best for productivity with higher than average ‘time on task’
Research from the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, which analysed responses from some 30,000 professionals, reveals significant 
differences between personal productivity levels in different countries and industry sectors. The findings also show a clear relationship between Happiness at Work and personal productivity.
The Institute measured components of Happiness at Work including energy levels, time engaged and feelings of happiness. Productivity was measured as ‘time on task’; the time that workers are actively producing outputs that make a tangible contribution to their organisation.
The international average for time on task is 58.8%, but there are significant differences between the various industry sectors. The Marketing and PR sector is one the best performing sectors with 60.9% time on task. At the bottom of the table is the Biotechnology sector with 53.2%.
Even greater differences are shown when comparing the different countries surveyed. Mexico is shown to have the highest productivity (73.2% of time on task), while Portugal has the lowest (43.3%).
Within both sets of data, the sectors and countries that show the highest levels of productivity also perform strongly in the measurements of Happiness at Work.
Jessica Pryce-Jones, founder director of the iOpener Institute and author of ‘Happiness at Work – Maximising Your Psychological Capital for Success’, notes: “While broad correlations between Happiness at Work and productivity have been recognised for some time, this detailed method of analyzing the components of Happiness at Work offers organisations actionable insights to formulate practical plans to improve their productivity.
“The sector and country results offer companies a contextual starting point; those in the Retail sector can ascertain how they measure up when compared to their sector and country averages and tailor their productivity initiatives accordingly. While the Marketing and PR sector can take encouragement from scoring highly, there is still potential for improvement in these industry sectors with businesses placing greater emphasis in 2014 on marketing’s contribution to business strategy. Meanwhile, the PR industry continues to undergo significant growth which places increased pressures on employee infrastructure.”
The report may be downloaded by visiting this link.
Gary McIlraith looks at how marketers can prepare for the changing nature of the internet in 2014.
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Samsung and Google top the list of most admired global brands in a multi–country survey from YouGov, covering Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
The list was compiled using YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks consumer perception of brands through daily nationally representative surveys in 15 countries around the world. Each brand is assigned a ‘Buzz’ score based on whether respondents have heard anything positive or negative about a brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news, word-of-mouth or friends and family.
Samsung rates in the top 25 most well-regarded brands in 13 of the 15 countries surveyed, while Google comes top 25 in 12 countries. They are followed by YouTube in third place, which ranks in the top 25 in 10 countries. German automaker Volkswagen (8) and American electronics brand Apple (8) both rank fourth globally. Rounding out the list of global super brands are Sony, Audi and BMW, which rank in the top 25 in six of 15 countries surveyed.
In Brazil, China and Mexico, three of the major emerging economies covered in the YouGov rankings, all of the global super brands rank highly with consumers. Google is notably absent from the top 25 in China, while Samsung is rated number one among Chinese consumers. Chinese search engine Baidu has the largest share in internet search in China, and is the country’s third most well-regarded brand, according to YouGov BrandIndex.
In addition to Volkswagen, German car makers Audi and BMW also make the top 25 in both Brazil and China, and enjoy a strong global profile in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Japanese electronics company Sony is also in a strong position, making the top 25 in six countries, spanning Latin America, Europe and the US.
YouGov BrandIndex CEO, Ted Marzilli, said: “Technology and internet brands transcend national boundaries and provide products and services that impact people’s daily lives. Whether it is technologies made by Samsung, Apple and Sony, or the wealth of information and videos made instantly available by Google and YouTube, these companies shape modern life and connect people from around the world, making them some of the most powerful global super brands.
“Three German automakers, Volkswagen, Audi and BMW, made our global super brands list, which shows the high regard that consumers around the world have for German craftsmanship in the auto category. In addition to being top brands in the European markets, they also rate highly in Brazil and China, which are the new frontiers of the global economy.”
Global super brands, based on the number of countries surveyed where they rank in the top 25:
- Samsung
- YouTube
- Apple, Volkswagen
- Audi, BMW, Sony
See the full global rankings
Did jumping on the BRIC economic bandwagon give you indigestion? Try a MINT. The economist who coined the term BRIC for the powerhouse economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China has done it again. This time it’s the MINT countries of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. Doug Sacks wonders if the new term sucks . . .
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