If someone came to The Marketing Centre and asked us what marketing they should do with £100, we’d tell them they were asking a trick question. Effective marketing is strategic, not tactical, we’d say, and we’d have to have a good idea about their business’ goals, situation and marketplace before we could even contemplate our recommended tactic. And we’d still be reluctant to answer the question, even then, because a marketing budget should follow a business’ marketing strategy, not come before it.

In 1860, Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills set off from Melbourne, heading north to explore the Australian interior. It had taken them three years to raise funds for and awareness of the expedition, during a gold rush. Neither had the faintest sense of bushcraft; their “essential supplies” included a cedar-topped table and chairs, rockets, flags and a Chinese gong. They broke down on the first day, took until midnight to reach the suburbs of Melbourne, and - to cut a long story short - their expedition was a disaster from which neither of them returned.

How much is your business worth? Ask this question to ten business leaders, and nine of them will focus on the bottom line - turnover, profit, revenue. Important factors, no doubt, but value runs deeper than the financials. Business value is generally calculated as Net profit of business times Multiple of earnings for the sector. This series is concerned with those multiples; those variable elements of a business that can add considerable value when it comes to the time to sell. In this series so far we’ve covered benchmarking, and the importance of a good employer brand. In this piece, we’re focusing on new product development.

Chris Bunniss has nearly three decades of global and local marketing experience under his belt; eighteen years with Boots and seventeen with SSL International, where he was global and UK marketing director for Durex and Scholl.

Marketing is eating up more of the sales funnel than ever before. Before they even speak to your sales team, customers will have progressed more than 70% of the way toward their purchase decision. How? They will have checked out your website, read some blog posts, looked at sales videos, checked your ‘About us’ page, perhaps downloaded an eBook. They will have checked out your social media channels or subscribed to your newsletter. Simply put, they will have interacted with your content.