“Winter is coming” - the doom-laden prophecy of Game of Thrones - warns of freezing temperatures, White Walkers and war. Well, we don’t have to worry about the White Walkers, but it’s looking like a tough winter ahead for many businesses.
US inflation just hit a 40 year high.
UK finance prophet Martin Lewis already “feels sick” at October’s energy price cap predictions.
And CMO’s (and their agencies) are dreading an email from the Finance Director, asking for a chunk of the marketing budget back, to help the business claw its way back to budget. That’s if the email hasn’t already arrived.
In times like these, for all of us working on brands, it can be difficult to know what to do.
How do we make a meaningful difference when being battered by so many factors out of our control?
I’ll skip the bit about continuing to invest in brands and spending your way out of a recession. Lots of great work has been done on this, but while all the evidence suggests it’s the best long term strategy, it’s a tough one to execute if you’re struggling to meet short term targets. If you’re not a private or family business, and your FD is looking for money down the back of the sofa, “let’s invest more in marketing now for a greater payback in the future” is not going to cut it.
So there are likely to be many emergency marketing department meetings between now and Christmas. Every business will face its own unique challenges, but I’d like to suggest three things that can help to frame a response in those meetings: focus, efficiency and positivity.
FOCUS. Use the crisis as an opportunity to get the entire company, not just the marketing team, focused on delivering the point at the heart of the business. Make sure everyone knows what that point is and what their role is in delivering against it. Then strip out all the superfluous initiatives and nice-to-have projects that have crept in over time. If you can go from fragmented to focused, you may even be able to do more with less.
EFFICIENCY. “We don’t have the money, so we’ll have to think”. Harness Ernest Rutherford’s mantra and look for innovative and more efficient ways to deliver the marketing plan. Speak to new people. Investigate new models. Suck up new ideas from sectors outside your own. Learn from the best businesses in your space in other markets. Then come back inspired and reconstruct the marketing plan from a blank sheet of paper, saying no to all the non-essentials.
POSITIVITY. We’ve all been in those emergency meetings where people compete to put on the gravest expression to show they get the seriousness of the corporate situation. It doesn’t help. These are the times when positivity – levity even – is needed more than ever. It’s easy to be upbeat and positive in the good times, but it requires a deliberate effort from leadership when times get tough. Hope is a much more motivating force than the threat of imminent calamity. Be positive in attitude and back this up by going big in action. Commit to a small number of big, bold statement actions that send a confident message to both internal and external audiences. After all, as Game of Thrones taught us, fear cuts deeper than swords.