I went to the Festival of Marketing, edition 2022. Good news: it was about marketing again. Bad news: we're fucked.
Last time I visited the Festival of Marketing in London (March 2022) I missed the marketing. It was the edge of the corona period and half of the presentations were about culture, team and mental health. All important, but it didn't have much to do with marketing. And if it was about marketing, then it was about the P for Promotion, so about tactics.
This year was different: back to basics
This edition (October 2022) was different. It was about marketing, entrepreneurship, market orientation, brand building and sales activation. It was about the long and short term, about effectiveness and efficiency and about the collaboration of marketing with other disciplines. Marketing in other words, and in fact the basis of marketing.
That can hardly be otherwise if you kick off with a presentation by marketing professor Mark Ritson. The essence of his speech was: 'No one gives a fuck about your brand'. More nuanced: Marketers think too little from the customer's perspective. A second theme in his speech was rising inflation and declining spending. In Ritson's words: 'We are fucked'.
Then add that the best way to deal with the current economic situation is to maintain budgets and marketing communication activities. A statement that he substantiated with an argument about the importance of share of voice and the creation of extra share of voice, resulting in a larger market share. If all brands follow his advice, then of course nothing will happen, but the practice is that many brands reduce their budgets and reduce advertising activities. Keep doing what you already planned, and your share of voice will grow.
Ritson ended his presentation with his marketing checklist:
Stay market-oriented (but actually: finally put yourself in your damn customer's shoes!)
Keep strategy simple (objectives, targeting, positioning)
Combine sales activation with brand building (the long & the short)
Pay attention to differentiation and distinctiveness. Be different, but above all striking and recognisably different
Keep your communication budget on track.
Plan B and C
Another interesting session was the conversation with the CMO and the CFO of On the beach, an online travel company (onthebeach.co.uk). The theme: How do I ensure an optimal relationship with the CFO? Crux of the whole story: talk to each other… That sounds a bit silly, but these two people had a healthy professional relationship. They had clear and shared strategic frameworks, spoke to each other regularly without an agenda and the CMO felt co-responsible for the P&L. The CMO left the nerdy marketing shizzle to the team and spoke to the CFO about goals (in terms of increasing average shopping cart sales and market share) and how she was going to achieve them. No, not all that complicated, but apparently (and that is also my own experience with the companies I see inside) a huge challenge. Organizations still work in silos. One of the take-aways from the conversation for me was the CFO's advice: Come up with a plan B and a plan C. If things go better than expected, what do we do? And if things go down, what's the plan? The first thing in particular, being prepared for success and being able to scale when needed, seems like a good idea to me.
Heinz
An engaging group discussion was about Heinz and was held with the marketer and the agency side team working on Heinz. The conversation itself wasn't all that interesting. It was about the heritage of the brand and how they are now building on it. So with respect for the past, but with a new impulse for the future.
What was interesting is that Heinz has an innovation team that does nothing but come up with new product ideas. Beanz burgers, Beanz meals, Beanz filled hash browns. So a lot with beans, because Beanz means Heinz. But that has now been supplemented with a new 'platform' (…) Beanz means more. Still less strong I think.
This only works from a holistic approach. You can come up with nice Saucysauce and Spaghetti Junction, but you still have to produce, sell and put them away through your distribution channels. This is only possible if the entire organization is willing to think in that direction and cooperate. That is not the case from a company with silos.
What I had some difficulty with was the role that Heinz appropriates from his new 'platform' in the problem of children who go to school without breakfast. A campaign is calling on people to donate £5 a month so that one child can have a decent breakfast. Heinz doubles every donation. To me that feels more like a clever advertising campaign than a company doing it right. Difficult to find the right balance.
Champagne
I was looking forward to the session with Jenni Romaniuk. Not because it was mainly about champagne, that too, but mainly because I think that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is an important voice in the marketing landscape and that their theory about brand growth and the role of distinctive brand assets is important. is to take note of. For anyone who works for brands: Romaniuk outlined her 'laws for growth' system (see image).
That system revolves around mental and physical availability and the specific interpretation thereof on various factors. In the session she discussed the meaning of category entry points, the entrances to the brand. Many brands assume inputs that are obvious, but what happens when those inputs change? And what do you do if this changes the competitive field? Is the way in which you present your product still adequate? With a different theme and in different terms, it was again about the customer's perspective. And once again it turned out that organizations and brands deal with this too easily.
Read the full article on Marketingfacts.