It’s normal to feel doubt in your marketing strategy

Like giving up your seat to the pregnant mum-to-be on a crowded train in rush hour, when you know you really should have your laptop open and getting work done, there are moments in the day that are the difference between doing the right thing, the hard thing and turning away from the one true path. I had one such moment a while back.
The brand transformation I was leading had faltered. Quite remarkably, and despite achieving huge impact in the year with strong growth and profit progression, we somehow managed to miss all of our annual brand growth targets.
Not one measure, but all of them.
We knew we had a struggle on our hands from a brand KPI perspective by Q3. So, after redeploying budget, an extra burst of brand activity was planned to get us over the line. It didn’t work. At least, it didn’t work enough.
It wasn’t a complete failure. We had grown brand awareness in key categories, and either maintained or increased brand strength in others. But we hadn’t grown as fast as we had hoped to meet our ambitious brand growth targets. Of course, it was at this point the Remuneration Committee got in touch to talk about scorecards and bonuses. Ouch. But that is how accountability works.
The pressure to pivot and change tack grew. Doubt, not something I am used to, slipped under the door and infected me, my team, as well as the exec team, all the while courage and clear thinking were fumbling with their keys in the lock.
Marketers are often playing a second game of chess against an unseen opponentLuckily, it was at this point that I was able to fall back on something that simply didn’t exist at the beginning of my career: a huge body of work from the IPA, Peter Field, Les Binet, the marketing professorial savant Ritson, and, of course, Marketing Week. Years of repeated articles, video interviews, podcasts and training that helped to cut through the fear and confusion.
Stepping back it all became clear. This was precisely the classic long and short situation Field and Binet plotted out in their seminal paper on advertising in the age of effectiveness back in the day. It was their argument about the timing and phasing of achieving the greatest efficiency and effectiveness over the long term – this was yet another use case – but rather uncomfortably happening in real time and on my watch.
Of course, we had been overambitious, had oversold likely impact. But better to shoot for Mars and land in the Moon, than aim for the Moon and not leave the atmosphere.
Even so, I hate missing targets. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that folding and following the easy path didn’t cross my mind. But then I remembered why I wanted to do this job and lead this brand transformation. To beg off now, after eighteen months of brand marketing, because the brand hadn’t grown quite as much as we wanted would be entirely the wrong strategic choice.
At heart, there were 3 reasons to build the case for persisting with the strategy:
- Allowing the marketing approach to revert to the flywheel of short term activation, running to stand still like Carroll’s Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, just wouldn’t do. It certainly wouldn’t optimise our investment in the long term and deliver the efficiency required in the business plan.
- To move away from ensuring our brand was established with customers focused on delivering a brilliant customer proposition and experience, would fatally undermine commercial effectiveness, and future growth. Distributors would lose faith.
- Withering on the vine and surrendering our nascent leadership position on the most important and valued category drivers for all audiences, would be an act of negligence bordering on the criminal. It would render us indistinct and without difference from peers, diminishing our overall brand value and ability to win.
Most likely stress induced, and with a bit of melodrama, at the height of this crisis my rather overactive imagination took me to the city of Troy. Hurtling around the walls of that ancient city, being chased by an angry Achilles, the hero Antiochus screamed “hold fast” in my ears.
And we did. The climax passed. The world hadn’t stopped turning. The moment of indecision receded. We had the right strategy. One big bump wasn’t an existential calamity. No, the right true path had, has, to be to stand up for creating an enduring brand that will enable real, lasting impact.
It’s possible to turn restructures from cost-saving crisis to strategic advantageSo, marshalling the collective wisdom of our vaunted industry we set about restating the benefits of our brand building approach. Unexpectedly, the previously doubting and rather panicky execs became reassured. What they needed was a marketing team with honesty and humility, but also, steely confidence and the clarity on what to do next to achieve our objectives.
The one concession though? Next time around we will err more on the realistic end of ambitious when we set our annual targets. My advice to anyone who gets a similar uncomfortable jolt… hold fast.
(P.S. Well dear readers, the postscript to this tale is that the new quarterly tracking data is in. All metrics up. We actually landed much closer to home than we thought, just a tad later than planned. There’s a lesson in patience.)
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