Look up, look ahead

While the headlines have softened a little and the rhetoric is more of a ‘soft’ recession than the self-inflicted imminent implosion of the Truss/Kwarteng aftermath, the mood music out there is still not that upbeat. Brands are still wanting to spend less. Agencies still fighting to get their share of the even smaller pie.

With most looking at the immediacy of the situation and making the best of 2023, perhaps there is the opportunity to look ahead and plan now to ensure success beyond the immediate?

Admittedly that is easier said than done. The average CMO tenure in 2021/22 was at it’s lowest in years. An average of 40 months pushes thinking into the short-term to demonstrate immediate impact. Add to this the quarterly reporting to Wall Street is counter-intuitive to long-term thinking. Miss a quarter and the pressure intensifies even more. Having ‘enjoyed’ this approach while at Digitas many moons ago, the pressure to deliver quarterly forces your hand to the immediate and the tactical with long-term thinking largely sidelined. 

Rather than put all the energy and priority into the immediate, my focus would be to look a bit further ahead:

In-year immediacy. Your committed plan, your business as usual. And whether your guru of choice is Ritson, Binet & Field or Sharp, avoid the temptation to cut spend; the evidence is clear that spend cuts in downturns puts you in a very unfavourable position against brands who maintain or increase spend when the world returns to normal. 

What’s next? As strategic counsel to brands, this is where I would be spending most of my time. The immediate and next few months should be all set. This is about what comes next. Understanding and prioritising the unmet needs of consumers is the crux of this and there’s nothing better than getting out and talking to your consumers and seeing them interact with your category, brand and product. As marketers, we’ve all got lazy. The internet can provide so much at the speed of light. But often masks the true problems consumers face and the opportunities to deliver against those or innovate. The world has changed so much that what’s important to consumers now is often quite radically different to to what it was and what is likely set down in a few bullet points in a carefully curated consumer persona. We get so absorbed in our language of segmentation that we forget to go and talk to real people. One former client group were so obsessed with the labels and statistics that they had never actually seen customers ‘in the wild’ yet would argue ferociously about whether an idea would resonate more strongly with archetype X or Y. Even a cursory stalking of the relevant aisles or malls will furnish you with fresh insights. Especially if you are tasked with looking after multiple markets. The pharmacy world of Spain or Italy is so different to the UK that you cannot comprehend it from a desk in the UK.

Getting fully involved in qual groups to discover deeper insights rather than used as a crutch to support a new campaign. A media agency I once came across used to spend a vast amount of money planning and booking campaigns for an automotive client but had never driven the car, spoken to owners or visited dealerships. The temptation to deliver a plan based on economical programmatic when what was absolutely paramount was eyeballs to make the brand visible and give it mental availability in the poor performing physical availability of dealership coverage. Unilever used to mandate that their brand managers spend time every year with consumers with ethnographic visits. It’s still surprising that most brands maintain a peculiar two-way mirror of distance between themselves and the real consumers. This discovery investment (never a cost!) is paramount to prioritise where the unlocked value is for your brand. Then you can get into the ideation of what will it take to unlock that change and be set to tackle the following year with renewed vigour and build on your solid current year activity.

Longer-term bets and innovations. This is where you may want to push back if you’re coming under immediate pressure. Push out, but don’t bin. Ideally this will be populated by your discoveries from the above activity.

While the immediate is likely to be louder, quieten the noise and focus on looking ahead.

Main photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash

Image of consumer groups from Team Eleven ‘consumer closeness’ session.