Why fear trumps marketing theory

Apologies for leading with a sentence containing both ‘trump’ and ‘fear’.

Despite this alarmist statement, I firmly believe our collective industry intelligence around marketing effectiveness has increased massively in the last two years. 

As marketers and advertising professionals, we’re remarkably absorbent. Like a really expensive towel, we suck up vast quantities of information from a number of sources and hold on to it. We repurpose the core principles in strategic decks, and share the most useful theories on LinkedIn. We’re all convincingly talking about long-term strategies, short-term tactics, creating persistent memory structures and behavioural science heuristics. 

Many of us are working hard to deliver on the theory, creating and executing marketing strategies resilient to changes (of economic conditions or executive leadership) and tying marketing investment to commercial growth.

All signs point to an industry that is primed and willing to learn, to adapt, to prove its value in the boardroom.

But the reality is we’re humans before we’re marketing scientists, and humans react to fear and uncertainty by being less strategic, more defensive and more conservative. Fear fuels a renewed focus on the purely fiscal, not the exploratory or experimental.

Deloitte’s recent Global Marketing Trends C-Suite survey showed leaders across nearly every C-suite function are feeling significantly less confident than they were in 2019 about their ability to influence peers and drive big changes in their businesses. CMOs specifically charted a depressing move from an already low 5% confidence to 3%.1

It’s a very rational way to respond to a situation that has forced many of us to shrink our ambitions, reassess our priorities, shore up our defences, and avoid thinking too much about the future. We’re managing the pervasive doom and gloom one day at a time. One week at a time. One month at a time. Marketing effectiveness can wait until 2021, right? When we’re back to normal?

Resist the urge to forget

As marketers we mustn’t match the cautious mood of the masses. We mustn’t forget the immutable rules of human behaviour and marketing effectiveness just when we were starting to get traction. Especially now when we have such meaty problems to tackle.

The impact of forgetting what we know not only retards brand growth, it also resets the role and reputation of marketing back to being a discretionary cost, rather than a lucrative and reliable investment.

As the radically pragmatic Rory Sutherland said, “Once marketing becomes marcomms, it’s no longer a problem-solving function, it’s a support function. And nobody consults a support function.”2 Oof.

What is marketing effectiveness?

Earlier this year, Cannes Lions and WARC released a smart and useful guide to marketing effectiveness called ‘The Effectiveness Code’ which offered a new framework for measuring marketing effectiveness - The Creative Effectiveness Ladder. The Ladder identifies six main types of effects that creative marketing produces, setting them in a hierarchy of levels from least to most commercially impactful.

Level 5 of the ladder is ‘commercial triumph’ which is, frankly, what we should be aiming for, daily.  “Creating sustainable commercial growth should by rights be the ultimate objective of most marketing efforts. Where creating sales spikes can be as simple as increasing the brand’s share of voice, driving sustained sales growth is a product of insightful strategy, considered media choices and blockbuster creativity”3

The effectiveness principles are simple and easy to apply:

• Set your effectiveness objectives with campaign duration and time frames to match

• Budget realistically using Excess Share of Voice as your yardstick for growth

• Favour fewer, longer campaigns over multiple short, tactical activations

• Begin with an insightful consumer-led strategy that ties neatly to your objectives

• Buy the most original and engaging creative expression of the strategy

• Maximise creative output by optimising media budget, campaign duration and number of media channels

• If campaigns are working well, ramp it up rather than switch it up.

It’s important to add that these principles rely on being able to measure the impact of any marketing activities; the time, effort, and money required to design and set up comprehensive and dynamic measurement frameworks is significant, but will always repay the initial cost by supplying us with robust data stories that force serious board level discussions about where and how to invest marketing budget in the future.

Remember how much you know

So - while the temptation is strong to forget everything you know to be true, we must hold the line and be more convincing, more confident and more consistent than ever in aiming for marketing effectiveness.

Because while businesses are making decisions to prioritise efficiency and productivity, our customers are expecting brands to behave with more insight, more humanity and more responsibility. Deloitte’s Global Consumer Pulse Survey found more than a quarter of consumers said they walked away from companies they perceived to be acting self-interestedly.

”Moving fast and striving for efficiency will always be important for businesses, but in times of crisis, we’re reminded of what’s unchanging—people’s values. When we pause to reflect on what people need, we can design more sustainable solutions that tap into what makes us human—our universal need for connection”.4 

Now is the time to flex our well-developed strategic muscle. The game is won not just via size, speed and strength, but with timing and technique.  We know these techniques, we know the moves, we know our foe. We’ve rehearsed and prepared, it’s time to move to the live environment. We might get a bloody nose or crack a rib, but at least we’ll be in the ring, rather than watching from the sidelines. 

We might be nervous but we’re ready.

1 Deloitte Global Marketing Trends C-suite Survey, May 2020

2 Rory Sutherland, The Marketing Academy Virtual Campus Lecture, September 2020

3 The Effectiveness Code, Cannes Lions and WARC 2020, James Hurman and Peter Field

4 Deloitte Global Marketing Trends Consumer Pulse Survey, April 2020

How Australia’s best marketers are sparking a trust renaissance.

A funny thing happened in March 2018.

30 clever and ambitious people from competing agencies and brands, were thrown together in a (rumoured to be haunted) quarantine station in Manly.

They had been hand picked for the 2018 Marketing Academy scholarship programme one week prior, and had briefly met their fellow scholars a couple of days earlier at a launch event in Barangaroo. This was to be their first ‘bootcamp’ for the year.

They knew they were going to learn about leadership, which made sense, because they’d all done very well professionally and were focused on getting to the next stage in their careers. They had also completed lots of training and workshops before, and were prepared for an intensive five days.

They were all individual high performers and hardwired to approach their peers and colleagues with a certain cool wariness, given they’d competed hard to win a place on the programme.

If they were honest and focused on personal growth. Growth that would lead to bigger roles with more responsibility. Growth that might allow them to join boards. Growth that would build their profiles in the industry.

Gathered in a sun-filled, convict-era building, they shared their bios and got out their notebooks.

Within 48 hours, this group of marketers had formed a tribe with a closeness that usually takes years to generate. Scholars shared stories, fears and secrets and listened to their cohort describe their own wrestles with self-belief and direction. They were vulnerable, embarrassed, sad and confused. They were heard. They were supported. They were protected.

They really had been quarantined. But this segregation, and the real point of the scholarship programme, was to inspire something powerful and transformative in the cohort, something more important than growth, something we now realise is in critically short supply: trust.

What was this magical medicine? How could we manufacture more? It was addictive and effective!

Defining Trust

Over the next six months at The Marketing Academy, we learned a lot about trust in theory.

• Trust is distinctly human. It’s about human interaction, real conversations.

• Human beings are inherently social and trusting animals who want to be led

• We cannot form trust through the internet – the ‘mirror neuron’ doesn’t light up when you send an email.

• Trust comes from a common set of values and beliefs.

• Trust affects a leader’s impact ​and the company’s bottom line more than any other single thing.

• Trust allows us to be economic with our cognitive capital.

• Trust requires reciprocity.

As scholars, our experience felt more visceral than the theory. It felt more powerful than a headline. It seemed more complex than a set of shared values.

So we selected trust as our pirate flag, our mantra and our bumper sticker.

The trust contract

Trust is the glue. Trust is the foundation. Trust is the contract.

Trust is the reason we buy, the reason we follow and the reason we believe in anything.

But trust is difficult. Trust is dynamic. Trust is easily lost and not so easily regained. In marketing, building trust in brands is essential. In business, inspiring trust in our leaders and our team is the key to extraordinary performance. In life, cultivating trust in ourselves is the cure for anxiety, fear and guilt.

But as a society, we’ve squandered our trust stores in pursuit of perpetual growth – growth at the expense of all other metrics.

Like Dr Seuss’ Lorax, we are staring at a social landscape that has been overfarmed for profit, decimated by ethical drought and poisoned by politics and security breaches.

It’s a self-perpetuating state; in a climate of distrust, our tribal bonds are weakened, our ethical standards lowered, and we revert to basic survival instincts, binary choices, command and control leadership, partisan politics, Game of Thrones-style battles for supremacy and market share.

Leading the renaissance

Under these conditions, in this climate and context, the priority must be to reverse the decay and start to plant, grow and nurture new sources of trust, so we don’t need to retreat to our insular positions on the fringe.

So while we all shake our heads and observe the ravaged landscape, who is working to regenerate? Who is looking for solutions? Who is listening to the Truffula trees?

We believe the trust renaissance starts with leadership.

Redefining growth to regenerate trust

Unfortunately there’s no quick strategy to manufacture or reinstate trust – unless we all attend five day boot camps at spooky convict outposts….

In order to generate more trust in ourselves, our communities, our brands and our institutions, we need to replenish the very soil we are working with. We are ready for a new breed of leaders who are prepared to put in the work, to dig the societal soil with good, ethical humus and tend it daily with conscientious action and intention. Slowly, we can begin to change the overriding culture of ‘growth at all costs’ to a more sustainable model of net social progress.