GEA is one of the world’s leading suppliers of systems and components for the food and beverage, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. It is an international industrial technology group, founded in 1881, whose areas of expertise include machine and plant design, development of cutting-edge technologies and processes, and components, combined with a comprehensive range of services.

With 18,000 employees and representation in 62 countries via subsidiaries or agents, the GEA Group develops the sustainability of production processes worldwide, in line with its raison d’être “engineering for a better world”. www.gea.com

To coincide with the GEA brand makeover, the Communications Departments at head office and at national level offered subsidiaries workshops to raise awareness of GEA’s 5 values, in order to build a corporate culture that supports the Group’s projects.

Despite the challenging economic environment, a new report from Linkedin shows many B2B marketers are set for increased budgets, backed by finance peers who have greater faith in their ability to drive revenue.

B2B marketers are more bullish about the outlook for the next 12 months with increased optimism fuelled by the prospect of larger budgets, and the backing of their finance peers, according to a new report by LinkedIn.

The professional network surveyed just under 2,000 marketing and finance leaders from across the world about their plans for the next year and found two-thirds of B2B marketing leaders expect their budgets to increase in the next year.

Across marketing, budgets have came under pressure this year because of spiralling costs as inflation threatened marketing budgets across B2B and B2C.

But the report appears to show the majority of B2B marketers have the backing of their CFOs. According to the report, 60% of the CFOs surveyed said that they were optimistic about their marketing team’s ability to drive revenue.

Tom Pepper, senior director of EMEA and LATAM at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, claims the endorsement offered by finance in the “B2B Marketing Benchmark” report shows the “financial fluency” of marketers is improving.

He adds: “In a period where conditions are harder and people are looking at the bottom line and looking for profitable growth, often marketing is a place that organisations will go to make savings. ”

“One of the biggest challenges for any marketer is to demonstrate the value of marketing to business outcomes.”

All week Marketing Week has been highlighting the key opportunities and challenges that will shape marketers’ working world in 2021. Last up, the value of value and the need to open up marketing.

By Marketing Week Reporters,  18 Dec 2020

The value of value

With a Covid-19 vaccine now rolling out in the UK, hopes are growing that life could return to some semblance of normality next year. However, it is likely to take society and the economy much longer to get back to normal as attention switches from managing its health impact to recovering from the financial cost of the pandemic.

 

As we look ahead to 2021, Marketing Week has identified the key opportunities and challenges that will shape marketers’ working world. First up, the need to adopt a dual-speed strategy and the value of failure.

By Marketing Week Reporters  15 Dec 2020

Our coverage of the ‘trends’ for the year ahead is slightly different this year.

Yes, we are flagging what we think you should be spending your time and money on, and why, but equally it is a commitment from us to focus on these topics in 2021 to help you better navigate the year ahead.

There’s little point flagging these challenges as important without going the extra mile and offering analysis and insight into how to tackle them.

It’s part prediction, part rallying call, part contents for 2021.

Adopting a two-speed strategy

If this year has taught us anything, it is that even the best laid plans still run the risk of being thrown out as the outside environment changes.

It may seem like a paradox, but recessionary periods actually provide fertile grounds for marketers to grow their brand’s market share if they’re prepared to think long-term.

 

Roland Vaile completed his Masters at Harvard in 1924. It would be a quarter of a century before the young Californian, along with fellow marketing legend Reavis Cox, would publish the masterwork Marketing in the American Economy. For now, the 25-year-old was building his reputation and had headed West to become an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Vaile wasted no time taking his Masters dissertation and publishing it in the Harvard Business Review.

He was lucky. Graduating from Harvard after the Depression of 1920 and 1921 meant that he was looking for a job just as the economy started to boom again. The 18-month recession, caused by the economic hangover of the First World War, also provided rich empirical territory to explore Vaile’s life-long obsession with advertising and its impact on the economy.

Vaile had spent his year at Harvard following the fortunes of 250 firms. Using secondary data and an occasional survey, he followed these companies through the recession and into the growth period that ensued. Tracking both advertising investment and annual revenues, Vaile was able to divide the firms into three groups: those that did not believe in advertising, those that cut back advertising during the Depression and those that increased it.

advertising in a recessionHis results demonstrated that companies that increased their ad budgets during the recession grew sales much faster than their rivals – not only during the downturn but also beyond it. Companies that decreased their advertising spend saw their sales decline both during the recession and then for the following three years. In relative terms, these companies actually underperformed even those that elected to do no advertising at all.

It was the first proper analysis to demonstrate a key lesson in advertising theory: the power of increased advertising in a recession. It was certainly not the last. In fact, over the subsequent century dozens of empirical studies re-confirmed Vaile’s main finding. Despite studying different firms across very different recessions, each study revealed that maintaining or even increasing ad spend during a downturn is invariably the right thing to do because it sets a company up to survive the downturn (a little) and then prosper (a lot) in the period that follows.

The great advertising thinker Stephen King observed exactly the same pattern in some of his last work. Working with fellow WPP scholar Alex Biel, King examined the performance of 390 firms listed on the PIMS (Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy) database during recessionary periods. The authors divided their sample into companies that decreased ad spend, increased it by less than 20%, or increased it by more than 20%.

Sure enough, the pattern Vaile observed all those years earlier was once again apparent. The companies cutting their ad spend did not lose share during the recession. The exit and extinction of competitor firms meant that simply staying in the category garnered a small growth in market share of 0.2% on average. But these companies did not see any increase in profitability from cutting back on their advertising either. “Cutting advertising spend to increase short-term profits,” the authors conclude, “doesn’t seem to work”.

The companies on the PIMS database that increased ad spend during a recession didn’t experience any increase in profitability either during the recession. In fact, on average they saw decreases in the short-term ROI from their increased ad budgets. But these companies did enjoy significant increases in market share from their increased budgets.

Companies increasing ad spend by up to 20% saw an average share gain of 0.5% and those that increased beyond the 20% threshold recorded average gains of 0.9%.

Crucially, Biel and King note that these share gains slowed down dramatically once the recession ended. Like a game of musical chairs, the time to move about is while the recessionary music is playing in the background. Once that music stops and the economy improves the chance to improve your position curtails significantly. In Biel and King’s research most of the market share gains were achieved during the recessionary period and then maintained during the growth that followed.

Growing market share in a recession

Why is a recessionary period such a paradoxically fertile period to grow market share? For the answer we must head to Southern California and renowned marketing professor Gerry Tellis. In an unusual but delightful move, Tellis worked with his – then undergraduate – son Kethan on a paper for the Journal of Advertising Research.

The father/son duo examined more than 40 empirical studies of the impact of advertising on sales during and after a recession. They started with Vaile’s research and included studies from all over the world and across every significant recession since 1920. It’s a fantastic piece of scholarship and worth quoting when the authors reach one of their main conclusions:

“…most firms tend to cut back on advertising during a recession. This behaviour reduces noise and increases the effectiveness of advertising of any single firm that advertises. Thus, the firm that increases advertising in this environment can enjoy higher sales and market share. When the economy expands, all firms tend to increase advertising. At that point, no single firm gains much by that increase. The gains of the firms that maintained or increased advertising during a recession, however, persist. This theory is also the most reasonable explanation for all the empirical effects of GDP on advertising and of advertising on sales, market share and profitability. It is also a simple, but strong, refutation of the theory for cutting back on advertising during a recession.”

From Research on Advertising in a Recession: A Critical Review and Synthesis
by Tellis and Tellis

It’s a paragraph that every marketer should tattoo across their chest as we hurtle into a Covid-19 recession. When the strange epidemiological crisis that currently engulfs us eventually comes to its bitter conclusion, we can expect an equally serious and probably more enduring period of economic pain. With unemployment rocketing, government investment at all-time highs and an economy in free fall, we must prepare for the Coronavirus Recession.

For most that will mean an immediate reduction in advertising spend. It may be that a marketer will sanction these cuts themselves given the downturn in demand. More likely, however, is that their superiors at the executive level will inform them that the advertising budget has been cut or eradicated completely.

Most estimates suggest advertising investment is likely to be reduced by between 30% and 60% over the rest of 2020 and beyond. Marketing Week’s latest survey suggests that around 90% of marketing budgets have been delayed or are under review.

Why brands need to think long-term amid the coronavirus pandemic

That’s terrifying news if you work in advertising, media or marketing services. But it will be music to the ears of a small bunch of superior marketers. A select few are preparing a tactical move that could set them and their brands up for the next decade. Trained marketers know more than shit ones and this is one of those moments where it counts. Specifically, these better marketers know four very important things:

  1. Advertising has both short and long-term effects. These longer-term effects can take several years to fully manifest and they are largely invisible in the immediate, inherently short-term metric called ROI.
  2. Less able marketers will now cut their ad budgets because their boss told them to or because they actually think that the savings from killing a campaign will be superior to any impact that advertising would have generated.
  3. By maintaining ad budgets at current levels this year and next, the same investment will have a much greater impact because competitors have either gone bust and stopped advertising or reduced their ad spend significantly – see point two.
  4. Ramping ad spend back up when the recession ends is relatively pointless because (and I refer you back to point one above) it takes time for advertising to achieve its ultimate, longer term effects.

The recession is, because of points one to four, an unprecedented opportunity to increase advertising and grow market share.

The importance of ESOV

Perhaps an easier way to think about this opportunity is to frame it around the important concept of ESOV – excess share of voice. Again, trained marketers will now nod their heads while untrained ones will shift-tab across to Google. There is an equilibrium between their a brand’s share of communication in a category and the market share it enjoys as a result. For 30 years we’ve known that, all things being equal, a company with a 10% share of voice will probably enjoy a 10% share of market.

But if that company gets ambitious and doubles its ad spend, let’s say from £2m to £4m, we also know something special starts to happen. Assuming competitors do not respond, the brand’s share of voice has just doubled to 20%. That means that its share of voice (20%) is 10 points in excess of its current market share (10%). It has an ESOV of +10. If that excess is maintained, the brand will pick up around 0.5% in market share each year until the equilibrium is restored and its market share reaches 20%.

In a recession something different, but even more magical, happens. As many brands in the category pull all – or most – of their advertising spend, the relative value of maintaining an advertising budget becomes significantly more compelling. Let’s say all the companies in your category halve their ad spend, for example. Suddenly your £2m budget that was 10% of the total share of voice now doubles to 20% as a result. Market share gains then ensue.

The reason the recession is such a fertile place to grow market share has nothing to do with the downturn itself or its impact on consumers. It’s because competitors pull back and you – hopefully – do not. When Sam Walton, the legendarily savvy founder of WalMart, was asked about the 1990 recession, his reply encapsulates best practice recessionary marketing: “I thought about it and decided not to take part.”

You need most marketers to be shit for your bold recession approach to succeed.

It’s a triply smart reply because advertising through the recession keeps your brand strong during the downturn, maintains the long-term trajectory of your marketing spend and brand salience, and allows you to enjoy a window of opportunity that will not remain open forever.

As the Tellises (Telli?) note above, while your competitors might return to big spending once the recession is over, the time lag to start impacting the market combined with the now sizable market share advantages achieved by the brands that retained a larger advertising footprint during the recession make life tough for brands that cut back during the recession and very fruitful for those that stayed in the game.

The gangster move in a recession is not just to maintain the budget but actually increase ad spend. That sounds like a lunatic move until you understand ESOV and the dynamics of long-term brand building. It’s one of the smartest plays in advertising and the reason why the likes of Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble, Lucky Strike, Toyota and Colgate all have a special chapter in their corporate museums devoted to a specific recession and the way their forebears held their nerve, increased marketing budgets, and won the decade that followed as a result.

Being a successful marketer in a recession

In their seminal 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review, Roaring Out of the Recession, Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria and Franz Wohlgezogen noted that only 9% of the 4,700 companies they analysed managed to emerge from a recession in better shape than when they entered it. And one of the key hallmarks of these successful firms was a “Janus-faced” ability to cut budgets in some areas while continuing to invest in marketing and advertising.

The authors cite the American retailer Target as a prime example. During the 2000 recession, the company relentlessly reduced operating costs and tightened distribution margins while upping its marketing and sales budget by 20%. It was a formula that not only saw Target emerge from that recession unscathed, but set it up for the most successful decade in its history.

You’ve probably already been called by a nervous media salesperson desperate to convince you not to kill your advertising spend with them. What they are telling you really isn’t bullshit – even though they themselves probably aren’t convinced either. The optimum response to the recession is to maintain, and ideally increase, your advertising investment.

Unfortunately, to pull this off you require three things. You need to have some money available to spend on advertising. Then you need an executive team smart enough to know marketing is an investment or trusting enough to listen to your presentation that explains all of this to them. And, finally, you need to not be shit.

There are few things more proven in the world of marketing than the power of advertising in a recession. But we must offset that fact against another well researched statistic: many marketers don’t know enough about marketing to do their jobs well. They don’t understand ESOV, long-term effects, advertising in a recession or the lessons of marketing history that stretch back a century to Roland Vaile and a ledger of ancient businesses that have long disappeared. In a way that last sentence is not a negative one. Frankly, you need most marketers to be shit for your bold recession approach to succeed.

If you can keep your head and your marketing budget, while those around you are losing theirs, you will be a marketer my friend. And a successful one at that!

Some of today’s most successful B2B marketers have revealed their winning strategies – with honest insights about the speed, agility and timing of campaigns and warnings about the dangers of siloed environments.

Marketing Week and The Marketing Practice recently conducted research with 600 B2B marketers that showed a link between long-termism and effectiveness in B2B marketing. We found that those who have outperformed their competition over the past two years are twice as likely to think long-term.

But why is this? What is cause and what is correlation? And how can we structure our teams and behaviours to adapt?

We spoke to a few of the most successful B2B marketers we know and dug a little deeper into the research to try and find some answers.

Brand and direct response, or ‘brand response’?

Most of the debate about the link between effectiveness and long-termism has been about the importance of brand-building, thanks to the great work at the IPA by Les Binet and Peter Field. A lot of the focus has been on the power of emotive messaging to build memory structures and salience.

But this focus is creating a false dichotomy, between brand and sales activation, separating two things that are part of the same spectrum.

Field himself is keen to point out the importance of integration. In the book The Case for Creativity, he argues for “multichannel creativity” that delivers “the same long-term benefits” but also replicating that creativity “across multiple channels [to] capture…the short-term urgency”.

Rachel Lockwood, marketing director for SAS UK and Ireland, takes this idea to its logical conclusion. At SAS, the whole front office – marketing, sales and service – works to a ‘One Plan’ approach.

By truly understanding what’s driving an organisation we can build relevance and, by building that relevance, we stand out.

Gemma Davies, ServiceNow

“We set goals that everybody shares. Through continuous review, education and goal alignment you begin to get a whole team behind a long-term plan. And a long-term plan allows the business to keep moving; it means we don’t pause every January and have to reboot again,” she says.

Zoe Hominick, head of business marketing at O2, agrees: “The key is to balance long and short term,” she says. “It’s about having an agile approach, which you continue to iterate throughout the year.”

Think long, learn fast

Here we see surfacing the magic formula that many agree drives effectiveness: long-term goal-setting and alignment, paired with agile approaches to test, learn and adapt.

Our research points to the effectiveness of this combination of long-term thinking and fast learning. Outstanding marketers – those who outperformed their competition over the past two years – are more likely to let a campaign run for longer before deciding if it’s effective.

 

infographie

 

This suggests patience perhaps, but also points to a willingness to learn; to continuously evolve a programme rather than seeing it as something set in stone.

As Gemma Davies, director of global account-based marketing strategy at ServiceNow, points out, this adaptive approach allows marketers to build relevance: “This takes time. Nobody makes these decisions overnight, so by truly understanding what’s driving an organisation we can build relevance and, by building that relevance, we stand out.”

Michael Cunningham, marketing director for Surface for Business at Microsoft, argues we need to balance being “super-surgical on the businesses and individuals you want to target” with the need to “come back a bit to ensure that awareness and purchase intent are built at the top of the funnel”.

It’s all in the timing

One often underestimated factor that may explain why longevity works is serendipity; the fortuitous – or perhaps deserved – upside of marketing activity that is ‘always-on’.

As Neil Dowling, VP of global integrated marketing at Genpact, puts it: “Your audience will tell you that they don’t care for your campaign timeframes. You have to think on a long-term basis and meet them where they are in the market.”

In recent times this idea has been framed as a buyer journey, and we’ve been encouraged by the likes of Sirius Decisions to map content to a series of stages on that journey. The journey metaphor lends itself to the idea that the buying process is linear, that one thing follows another from awareness to consideration to purchase. The reality is of course a lot more messy, random and, to be frank, interesting.

The production line problem

The wicked stepsister to the belief in a linear buyer journey is the way we have chunked up the funnel into functional teams to create a production line approach to marketing. Hence the need to navigate a creative agency in Soho, a social content agency in Shoreditch, a team doing performance marketing in Hyderabad, marketing operations in Texas, and so on.

This chunking up of the funnel by function not only makes things more complex, the more insidious consequence comes from perverse incentives. Each functional team has its own measures and priorities. Digital marketers create conversions, field marketers generate leads, content marketers get off on engagement. They all squirrel away, determinedly optimising their own specific KPIs.

The assumption is that if you optimise every part, you will make the whole machine more effective. But what happens is efficiency in each silo but not effectiveness overall.

Conversions, leads and engagement improve, yes. But the results that really matter, like growing market share or profitability, remain not so much out of reach as not even on the radar.

In a siloed environment, it becomes very hard to accommodate the messy, human behaviour of the audience. We cannot easily respond to feedback, learn from what works outside discrete disciplines or take an audience-led approach to market.

Strategic thinking, agile working

The combination of long-term goal-setting and agile working suggested by Lockwood and Hominick gives us a direction of travel to overcome the problem of silos and improve effectiveness.

We need to unite skills and diverse opinions from across the front office. We need to break the tyranny of upward reporting on effectively meaningless KPIs and be brave enough to be measured on something that is not in our direct control.

If we give people the remit to think ‘gestalt’ and solve problems that lie in the way of selling more stuff, to look at the problem holistically, we will get better results.

David van Schaick is CMO and CDO at The Marketing Practice. To find out more go to themarketingpractice.com.

  1. The era of social media self-regulation is over

With regulation on the horizon and government scrutiny reaching fever-pitch, the social media giants are already struggling to back up their claims to being guardians of free speech that have no responsibility for the content posted on their platforms. In a world of data breaches, hacking and fake news, social media giants will need to take greater responsibility for their communities if they are to avoid hefty regulation over the next 12 months. The calls for change are mounting and in 2019 failing react to the concerns of society at large will no longer be an option.

By Sarah Vizard, News editor Marketing Week

 

The majority of marketers are prioritising short-term tactics over long-term strategy, while finance bosses believe marketing is still based on short-term impact.

According to a survey of the marketing industry by the IPA and ISBA, 75% of marketers and 73% of agencies agree that short-term tactical needs often take priority over longer-term objectives. Some 58% of marketers and 43% of agencies agree marketing direction regularly changes to meet the demands of the marketplace, with just 22% and 26% respectively disagreeing.

By Helen Edwards, columnist at Marketing Week 

 

The best marketing practitioners develop strategies based on sound theory, but they are pragmatists when it comes to driving it through.

 

Two things make marketing difficult: theory and practice. Of the disciplines around the boardroom table it can be the stickiest in study and the thorniest in application.

What makes marketing theory so tormenting to grapple with is its diffuse and protean contextual backdrop: the swirling chaos of markets combined with mercurial human behaviour. Where are the enduring truths?