Digital icons

Perspectives

Marketing’s role in commercial recovery

Implementing recovery situation rooms

Recovering from COVID-19 can require marketing-led commercial innovation. A recovery situation room can make that happen.

Explore content

Marketing and commercial recovery

Successful marketers have always brought the voice of the customer to their companies. Now, as companies emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, that voice may be more needed than ever to guide business recovery. Standing up a “recovery situation room” can make marketing’s voice heard.

The COVID-19 crisis has helped intensify the need for commercial innovation. Companies worldwide are realizing that tried-and-true methods of doing business may not be enough in our new normal.

We are already seeing a shift when it comes to buying preferences. Consumers are turning to e-commerce, such as grocery delivery, at an even faster rate, and that trend is likely to continue to accelerate. Looking ahead, the conscientious consumer is also likely to seek more information about products and logistics, spend more time and money locally, and prefer contactless payments. In-person sales and service are likely to decline as those processes increasingly move online.

Phone tap payment
Marketing’s role in commercial recovery

In this time of crisis, marketing can accelerate commercial recovery. Time to consider a “recovery situation room”?

Customer interaction preferences are shifting

It’s a similar story in B2B. Customers’ desired channels are shifting. They are increasingly comfortable with, and demanding, remote, digitally enabled content and experiences as an integral part of their relationship with suppliers. Many businesses are embracing “remote everything” as the new design point.

Across both B2C and B2B markets, these new customer interaction preferences often come with new expectations for brands. An emphasis on well-being, fairness, transparency, and caution will define many customer behaviors in the coming months. Customers want to know they are dealing with purpose-driven enterprises who care about and contribute to broader societal well-being.

Tab

A unique opportunity: Recovery situation rooms

Commercial demand is going to come back looking different than it was precrisis. Not only are different regions recovering at different rates, creating a geographic patchwork with which commercial functions must contend, but the ways in which demand needs to be served have also changed.

This situation presents a unique opportunity for marketing organizations to take the stage to drive the commercial innovation needed for recovery and growth and at the same time demonstrate the value they can bring to the enterprise. Marketers have long embraced a deep understanding of customer behavior to design commercial strategies and campaigns, positioning their companies to address shifts in the market landscape. Modern marketing, increasingly digital, customer-centric, and data-driven, is the function best equipped to guide the company’s commercial innovations. But to do so, marketing should better connect to commercial activity. That’s where the "recovery situation room" (RSR) comes in.

We propose a recovery situation room to help enable cross-functional and customer-centric commercial innovation. The voice of the customer, and the new market landscape, should be the dominant drivers of commercial campaigns. The marketing function therefore should assert a leadership role, using its voice of the customer capabilities to influence and align all the commercial teams across sales, support, service, and other customer-facing functions.

Meeting

Download the full PDF to learn more about a marketing-led recovery situation room.

Explore content

Did you find this useful?
Top trends from The CMO Survey

7 trends and what they mean for marketers

The confident CMO

3 ways to increase C-suite impact