Hey, it’s not ignorance, it’s ADVERTISING!

Yes I believe that most (though of course not all) advertising has negative ROI and I’d love to see some studies that are *not* from the industry itself to challenge this notion. It’s also common here in te USA to assert that advertising based branding campaigns are critical to success. I assume you feed your kids by convincing clients that radio is best for this?

I would suggest that most successfully branded companies (Google, ATT, Coke) *started out* with new, innovative stuff and that the advertising came later to support that success.

My “expertise”, to the extent anybody has that in the shameless mess called brand marketing, is primarily with medium and small travel businesses so I’m open to the idea that branding may work on a global scale where a large percentage of a population has interest in the product *and* you can reach them cheaply. But rules that apply to Pepsi or Telephone empires are commonly – and foolishly – applied to small and medium businesses and destinations that squander millions on silly “branding” campaigns that that rarely work (no? examples?.

I’m open to being proved wrong, but conventional wisdom often means conventional ignorance.