In a world grappling with the pandemic’s fallout, businesses face unprecedented challenges. Employees worry about the future, projects are being canceled, and uncertainty looms. As a leader, your focus shifts to business survival—rightsizing, finding paying clients, managing risks, and instilling confidence across stakeholders.
Marketing as a Guiding Force:
This crisis demands an inward marketing approach, aligning staff, suppliers, and internal resources with the brand DNA. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as an activity for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging value, but it’s more than that. From Peter Drucker’s customer-centric perspective to Seth Godin’s emphasis on connectivity, marketing permeates every aspect of a business.
Leadership Priorities:
As the CEO, your priorities include rightsizing the workforce, securing paying business, managing debt collection, and evaluating risks. The time spent with stakeholders, shareholders, and team members intensifies as you strategize the way forward.
The Role of Marketing in Crisis:
In times of crisis, some argue for continued marketing initiatives to instil confidence, engage customers, and seize opportunities. However, for many businesses, launching new products, advertising campaigns, or social media entries might not be the immediate solution.
The marketing budget becomes an attractive area for cost-cutting, but before making decisions, it’s crucial to understand the profound role marketing plays. Beyond traditional communication tasks, marketing brings customer centricity, brand custodianship, and internal and external leadership.
The Marketing Department’s Functions:
Communication and Advertising: Running campaigns, managing social media, launching products, and creating sales collateral.
Customer Centricity: Understanding and representing customer values, focusing on retention, satisfaction, and customer lifetime value.
Brand Custodianship: Passionately representing brand values, ensuring the brand DNA is embedded in every interaction.
Leadership: Guiding the organization externally (customer-centric view) and internally (staff-centric view).
Building a Unified Brand Culture:
In a brand-led business, every interaction must reflect core brand values. Whether a customer walks in, receives a delivery, or interacts with any department, the brand culture should be consistent.
Training becomes crucial to align every component of the business with the brand DNA.
Internal Positioning and Training:
As questions about the business and individual roles arise, it’s time to reassess the internal position. This is where the marketing leader steps in, researching and evaluating each business component, identifying gaps, and managing training programs to fill them. Training doesn’t have to be expensive; it’s an opportunity to address serious concerns within the team.
Acting Interdependently:
The past months have taught us the importance of interdependence. Now is the time for a unified brand message directed at everyone—shareholders, stakeholders, suppliers, customers, and staff. Managed by the marketing leadership, this approach creates a cohesive brand culture.
In conclusion, seize every opportunity presented by these challenging times, examine, and exploit them wisely.
About Garth Sutherland
You’re a busy business owner, not a marketing manager. Your focus is on customers and operations, not wrestling with marketing strategies. I’m Garth Sutherland, and with vast experience in the marketing solutions available to small businesses, I understand what it takes to drive growth. My background, spanning both local and international brands, has equipped me with a strong strategic focus for marketing delivery. I know you need action and results, not just elaborate plans.
If the insights shared in the blog above (and others at www.smallbusinessmarketing.co.za) resonate with you and highlight a solution that would add value to your business, then you’re in the right place. As a fractional marketing consultant, I don’t just develop actionable marketing plans for your business; I crucially manage their execution. This frees you up to do what you do best: build your business, without the added overwhelm.
Ready to achieve your personal and business goals?
Contact me, Garth Sutherland, today for a direct conversation about your growth challenges:
Email: garth@smallbusinessmarketing.co.za
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/garthrsutherland/
Call: +27 (0) 81 265 5803
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