Marketing's Marketing Challenge

Let's start with the good news. UK marketing budgets have hit a 10-year high, according to the latest IPA Bellwether Report, indicating that businesses and brands are embracing growth strategies and showing a quiet sense of confidence around marketing and advertising.

Nascent improvements in the economic climate and decreasing inflation levels are contributing factors, of course, but this is good news nevertheless.

So can we expect a new commitment to the idea that marketing is an investment not a cost, and a new respect for the role that marketing plays in driving business health? After all, the modern marketer has been busy making a better case for investment in their brand, linking brand strategies to measurable financial outcomes—shareholder value included. And there's a reason why the Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden is pledging to "over-invest" in marketing, or that Starbucks has joined a growing list of brands putting former marketers in the top seat, hiring former marketer Brian Niccol as its new chief executive and chairman.

But these remain atypical examples and the reality is that the ongoing debates over the lack of marketing leaders within the corporate boardroom is evidence enough that the role is not always valued sufficiently within many organisations.

Amongst other things, the marketing function builds the equity of the products which the business sells and represents the consumer within the boardroom. So why does the marketing function still struggle to command the value and respect is surely deserves? We sat down with senior marketers from Aviva, Virgin and Reckitt Benckiser to discuss what it means to be a modern marketer.

The challenges of the lonely marketer

“In many ways marketing can be one of the loneliest jobs you can ever do” reckons Phoebe Barter, group brand and sponsorship director, brand & corporate affairs, Aviva. As Barter points out, being a CMO involves holding a different mindset and speaking a different language to many others in the organisation, including the CFO.

Barter also outlines other challenges for marketing leaders, including the lack of having a peer within the business who understands the challenges and can offer advice; meanwhile peers outside the business don’t understand the company's specific culture and dynamics to advise fully either.

And while agency partners are there for support, they too don’t know the full breadth of what the marketer deals with each day.

“I have fantastic colleagues and we have each other’s backs 100 per cent," Barter explains, "but the role of the marketer is evolving so much. It's about sustainability, it's about reputation, it's about governance, it's about IP, it's about partnerships, it's about a whole bunch of stuff the agencies never see. And that's before being the leader and reporting to the CEO,” Barter adds.

Kelly Best, chief marketing officer, Virgin Red, feels that the CMO role in recent times has become even more focused on return-on-investment, so it's essential marketeers can talk the language of the board and CFO. Within less brand-led companies, marketers can struggle to be heard and lose their creative nerve, Best believes.

She also adds that while more professions initially go through years of training, the constant shift of responsibilities marketers experience - adapting to technology and cultural changes - means they are always learning on the job.

“The areas we need to be across are vast, from emerging trends in AI and data to ensuring a laser focus on performance, customer behaviour and creativity. A great marketeer needs to assemble many jigsaw puzzle pieces, whilst often learning on the job,” Best explains.

Both Best and Barter agree that the success of marketing is dependent on the leadership of a business and how their marketing team is heard and respected, based on the whole corporation's belief in what it can achieve in terms of reaching the company’s goals.

Sameer Amin, the global director of data driven marketing and media for Reckitt, adds that if a company is marketing-led - as opposed to being product-led or sales-led - that decides how important a role marketers will be able to play, as well as how commercial they will be, with everything focused on return on investment deliverables.

He sees “an element of credibility” around marketing within Reckitt because of how it measures and records its impact on overall profit and loss. And Reckitt has also created its own internal way of marketing, offering a playbook that allows its executives the opportunity to drive change.

“What we’ve done in marketing/media is that we’ve overcomplicated,” theorises Amin, who explains that he is referring to the jargon that has been adopted that others across businesses don’t understand. He admits that he now tries to “dumb it down” when speaking beyond his department to ensure others relate.

“That's the main thing: how we drive business objectives, category of market share and how we then translate the strategies that we're working on that can deliver against those objectives,” he adds.

Reckitt has also begun to ensure that on investor calls its marketing capabilities are spotlighted - such as summaries on new tech, data and how those are used - to grow awareness within and outside the company.

How to empower marketing to be as effective - in the short, medium and long-term - as it can be is of course a perennial conversation. And the parameters of possible solutions are constantly changing as the shape of the economic, cultural and technological landscapes shift.

For now, though, marketers have never had more data, research and hard evidence to support their case for a central role in businesses. Collectively we all must keep a spotlight on that evidence.