Four ways marketers need to step up

Marketers need to step up in four areas – market intelligence, innovation, partnering with finance teams and working to a “single goal” – in response to the growing complexity facing businesses.

JP Castlin, an independent management consultant at JPCC, and James Hankins, global vp/marketing strategy and planning at Sage, discussed this subject in a session for WARC’s Creative Impact track at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The background

• A micro factor such as inflation, and micro factors, such as rising costs for business services, are impacting corporate budgets.
• With every line of expenditure under scrutiny, marketers will have to prove their value in new ways.
• They are also well situated to lead the necessary company-wide response to today’s challenges.
• “We need to move into a new level of strategic leadership – that is what’s going to be required for marketers,” said Castlin.

Market intelligence – not myopia

• To begin, marketers ought to expand their mindsets beyond “myopic” concerns – like creative and content production – and think about the wider dynamics shaping the marketplace.
• A key goal is to develop a “map for businesses” that takes account of the wider fiscal environment, market models, competitor analysis, and so on.
• “Marketing should mean ‘market intelligence’,” Hankins said.

Working with finance teams

• Chief financial officers (CFOs) often perceive marketing as a “variable cost” and are unconvinced by its traditional metrics like impressions and awareness.
• In overcoming such doubts, marketing teams should behave like a “commercial function”, partnering with the finance experts to develop a shared point of view.
• That involves “building financial models, building the implications out and building credibility,” said Hankins.

Driving innovation

• Marketing teams are charged with understanding category development, trends and consumers’ “unmet needs”, and thus can drive innovation.
• “They should be setting innovation accelerators or skunkworks, separate organisations that build out safe-to-fail experimentation as a feature,” said Hankins.
• Such a test-and-learn philosophy can generate knowledge of what delivers an impact, and what does not, in a forward-looking way.

Working to a “single goal”

• The fourth “key principle”, Hankins said, recognises that marketing isn’t the only “growth leader” in a firm; divisions from sales to operations can also play this role.
• Rather than taking a siloed view, marketers need to have “adult conversations” with other teams to determine how they can collectively achieve a “single goal”.
• “It’s us and them working together as an operation, working out where money is best spent effectively … with a single goal, not a marketing goal,” Hankins added.