Optimists are us

Somebody’s got to be optimistic. And it might as well be marketers. Everywhere else around the organisation, it’s stasis. In this economic climate, with this political backdrop, with that budget, your peers across the disciplines aren’t going to be feeling the animal spirits that open possibilities and liberate funds.

Ops will be playing it safe, focusing on efficiencies today rather than experimentation for tomorrow. Finance is going to batten the hatches. Even tighter. HR is holding off recruitment, with employment costs piled on again this year to add to the shock of the last. Meanwhile, leadership talks growth but offers no credible way to achieve it.

So, it’s us. We’ve got to somehow bring energy, drive and imagination to garner growth from unexpected quarters. We’ve got be up when everyone else is flat. But what have marketers got to be optimistic about?

I suggest three things.

1. Our underused lever of price

Marketers are meant to work back from consumer needs, and when times are as tough as they are now, our efforts can play an even bigger role in people’s lives than when everything is going swimmingly.

One obvious but underexplored way marketers can make a difference is with pricing. But not just blanket discounting, which would win friends but lose money. It’s price innovation where the opportunity lies, to bring unexpected new benefits for both the customer and the business.

Wizz Air’s ‘All you can fly’ initiative is a neat example. The budget airline offers a €499 annual subscription with unlimited flights as long as you book within a three-day window before take-off, emphasising the appeal to the spontaneous traveller. It brought in 21,000 new subscribers last year.

Pricing by results – based on what the user gets out rather than what the business puts in – is another innovation that can reshape the competitive landscape, especially for B2B marketers.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, The Ends Game, published in 2020 by marketing professors Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg, is a good place to start – if only for the joyous example of the Spanish comedy theatre that charges customers ‘per laugh’, at 30c a go, up to a maximum of 80 laughs (€24) per show.

The much-neglected lever of price is sitting there patiently awaiting our grip, alongside those other marketing levers of product, place and promotion. Now is the time to use it more courageously.

2. Our buried treasure of data

If operations was looking at a mountain of surplus, backdated inventory, it would also be looking at a loss. If HR was pondering excess headcount, it would also be pondering costly severance packages.

With marketing, the equivalent problem isn’t a problem but an opportunity. What we are sitting on is a rich seam of data – the sum of all the myriad research exercises carried out over the past few years. That’s our secret surplus, and in there will be dynamite stuff that’s long been forgotten: focus group findings, usage and attitude decks, ethnographical studies, needs-and-drivers analytics, semiotics reports.

The beauty is that this kind of data has a long half-life: much of it concerns probing into human nature as it relates to our category and that is not a fast-moving current, even if you make fast-moving goods.

So, a clampdown on budgets for new research should be welcomed as a chance to take a step back and review what we already have. The best way to do it is the one suggested by Marc de Swaan Arons, then of Millward Brown, at a big US conference a few years back. Pin all the data you hold on to the walls of a big room and have the team walk around it asking, ‘What story is this telling us?’

This might be the first time ever that the outputs of different methodologies have been viewed holistically, at the same time. You will be amazed at what it can illuminate. I’ve seen it reveal unmet consumer needs that the business can address without resorting to costly new innovation. Instead, the answer has been new combinations of assets the organisation already holds: pharmacological actives, culinary ingredients, product-and-service pairings.

There will still be regulatory and practical hurdles to overcome, of course, but the brand will be way ahead of its competitors, which is good news for consumers and an upbeat narrative for analysts.

3. Our wide-eyed belief in ideas

In 1983, Harvard academic Theodore Levitt, the founder of our discipline, published a book entitled, simply, The Marketing Imagination. Business books didn’t go in for long, come-hither subtitles back then but if they had, this one might have read: ‘Why imagination is the most important thing marketers bring to the business, and how ideas can power transformative growth.’

It was a theme endorsed and amplified by the US economist Deirdre McCloskey in her epic trilogy on the mystery of the stunning surge in prosperity over mankind’s past three centuries. Ideas, she argued, were the ultimate source of growth, and would never run dry in free societies.

Ideas are the marketer’s stock in trade. Or should be. At our best we generate them for positioning, communications, packaging, pricing and, most of all, innovation.

We shouldn’t shirk that duty, shouldn’t feel it’s too flimsy and coy in the modern, ROI-driven corporation. Especially not in a downturn. Ideas are free at the point of conception and while most will be destined for the bin, some will make it through the rounds of testing, refining and regulatory probing to generate business success. We should do more of this seemingly fluffy stuff, not less.

But it’s not easy in the face of the corporate critique to which marketers are often prey. Perhaps the weightlessness of our principal offering is a reason for marketing’s perceived status as the ‘lightweights’ of the C-suite. Perhaps our faith in something so seemingly ephemeral is what earns us the epithet of naïve, in the presence of the more rooted disciplines around us.

Well right now, those characteristics are virtues, not vices. In the boggy ground of today’s commercial trading, lightness of foot is going to take us further. And in the gloom of this post-budget reckoning, our wide-eyed openness is going to help us see ahead.

In any case, it’s not as if what’s holding business back at the moment is all about substantive impediments. Look at the business headlines and ask yourself what they are telling you. ‘Scaremongering killing off animal spirits.’ ‘UK business confidence falls to record low.’ ‘Manager survey reports widespread fear and scepticism.’

These are no more than sentiments, the perceived accumulation of human feelings kettled in the corporate corridor. And you just know that, perhaps months from now, perhaps years, it will suddenly reverse and there will be an explosion of new confidence and growth.

It’s not that marketers can engineer that explosive new growth on their own. That really would be naïve. But when I look around the boardroom table at those other corporate disciplines – ordered, measured, chaste – it is obvious to me that we are best placed to provide the spark.