Deep Dive: Marketing investments provide buffer for instability

Francesco Lagutaine, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, M&T Bank

“Strong companies are the ones that invest in the downturn, because competition becomes weaker. They have the strength to continue marketing and growing the business, so they are then in the best possible place when cycles change. From a marketing perspective, this is the time to think about rationalizing spend. It’s imperative for strong organizations to continue investing.”

Niamh O’Driscoll, Head of Brand and Marketing, Virgin Media Ireland

“There’s so much competition in the market around value and price, and I suppose I see our role as making sure we’re continuing to fill the leaky bucket. You have to get consumers in, and you’ve got to retain customers—maintain a net number—and so the focus on brands probably is becoming more important to driving a connection with consumers so that when they’re viewing that value equation, we are the most preferred brand in the category.”

Shweta Ponnappa, Chief Marketing and Digital Experience Officer, Providence

“With the continued economic headwinds health care faces, marketing teams really earn their organization’s trust to be able to drive growth, and one of the ways to do it is to show incremental and attributable revenue and being really smart about how we use our ad spend. We’ve developed this in-house, proprietary algorithm that turns ads on and off based on availability of our clinics—aligning access to demand—saving ourselves advertising dollars and better meeting consumer expectations.”

Elad Ravid, Chief Marketing and Digital Transformation Officer, Strauss

“We developed a loyalty club called Strauss Plus, which is the most important initiative that we are managing to approach the loyalty challenge. We’re inviting customers to scan their shopping cart so we can automatically identify every product that belongs to Strauss, then we reward those products with points. We are using it not only for consumer insights and better understanding of the market, but also to create seeds for media, for online advertising.”

Lori Gustafson, Chief Brand and Digital Officer, Marriott Vacations Worldwide

“We’re looking across the organization and at all of the underlying applications and systems we have in place that power our most critical business functions. So, capabilities like how we manage our inventory, how we power our reservation systems, and what deep commerce capabilities we need to enable through our web and mobile app experiences. We are also looking to revisit how all our data is managed, stored, and utilized across the organization in a meaningful way. We’re asking what’s best for the customer—and how do they expect to interact with us—and how do we put that information at the center of our decision-making?”

Michael Schuld, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer, MediaMarkt/Ceconomy

“We are looking very much to shopping experience, usage experience, and impact experience. We believe that there is no reason why a retailer with an omnichannel platform cannot be an ecosystem. We are living in a post-cookie area. We have to create customer lock-ins, and we have to create stickiness when it comes to the category of experiencing consumer electronics so that the customer’s journey starts with us again.”

Ponnappa, Providence

“Consumers know that most companies have their personal data. In health care, we treat that data with extreme care and discretion. Consumers still expect easy, seamless digital transactional experiences as well as anticipatory, personalized experiences across their entire journey with us. Predicting what the consumer wants to do next and helping them get there is going to be critical. I often hear about personalization being discussed as its own topic, but for its own sake, it’s useless. It must create value for the consumer by lowering their effort.”

Ravid, Strauss

“Investing and developing a central digital experience (DXP) platform over the next year will enable us to advertise and create more personalized advertising campaigns and taking consumer insight from one category to the other, from one brand to the other. If I see upscale premium customers in the dairy division, I know we can use the data to create offers in the coffee world, for example. This centralized way of managing data is something that we only started to do, but that’s one of the things that will enable us to offer personalized data and then to leverage the data that we all already have.”

Lagutaine, M&T Bank

“At a performance marketing level, it’s really important to get targeted, and there are personalization techniques that allow us to constantly and iteratively improve our ability to get returns on those messages. But we always need to be careful not to get creepy or go into that place where you push it too far. You might catch 60% of people completely right, but that also means a 40% failure rate of turning people off.”