There is a line attributed to Bill Bernbach, the advertising pioneer who helped build Doyle Dane Bernbach into one of the most celebrated agencies of the 1960s, that has traveled well beyond Madison Avenue: "I don't feel a principle is a principle until it costs you money."
Mr. Bernbach was speaking about his agency's decision to drop cigarette accounts after the surgeon general's 1964 report, a move that was, at the time, commercially unusual. Most agencies kept the business and kept the fees.
Now a writer at The Drum, the trade publication, is invoking Mr. Bernbach's dictum to make a different argument — one aimed at business-to-business marketers who, the writer suggests, have all the evidence they need about what works but lack the vertebrae to act on it.
The case is not complicated. Research from the B2B Institute, working with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the marketing effectiveness consultants Les Binet and Peter Field, has established that share of voice drives market share, and that distinctive creative work can multiply the return on a media budget by a factor of five. The findings have been available for years.
And yet, the writer observes, the standard objections remain: budgets are constrained, the chief financial officer is skeptical, the sales team dominates the conversation, the buying cycle is too long to prove anything. (One might note that these objections have also been available for years.)
The article frames the problem as personal rather than strategic — a matter of individual conviction rather than organizational inertia. Marketing leaders who believe in long-term brand investment, it argues, must be willing to stake their credibility, their relationships, and possibly their positions on that belief.
It is, in other words, a call for martyrs. Whether the industry will produce them remains, as always, to be seen.
Original story published in The Drum: "The research is done. Now B2B marketers need to grow a backbone | The Drum"