Ask any marketer, and they’ll tell you that 2023 has been a year of budget cuts and canceled launches. According to Gartner’s CMO Spend and Strategy 2023 Survey, 75% of senior marketers reported being asked to do more with less. As budgets decrease, marketing expectations significantly increase, with 86% of surveyed senior marketers agreeing their organization must undergo significant changes in how they work to achieve their goals.   

Right now, that near-universal do more with less directive is an especially bitter pill. Marketers still have whiplash from the last few years, with some businesses seeing massive contraction during the pandemic and others experiencing dizzying growth, resulting in competing interests between brand and demand. Many hoped for at least a glimmer of normalcy.   

Between inflation and rising interest rates, the likelihood of a recession has become a daily odds-making game for economists. The risk is falling. Yet many, including CEOs, investors, legislators and consumers, are already entrenched in a `vibecession.’ They feel things are bad, even if economic indicators don’t support that view. In conjunction with the disruption of the last few years, it has become almost impossible for marketers to rely on historical planning processes and requires them to maximize flexibility, even as budgets and resources diminish.   

This uncertainty isn’t necessarily bad news for the creative and agile marketer. After all, disciplined belt-tightening can allow marketing leaders to reflect, establish new ways of working, and find creative ways to deliver maximum value with their current resources.   

As marketers look to close the year strong and head into 2024 planning, we’ve identified seven critical steps marketing organizations should take to strategically balance and blend brand and demand marketing agendas and inform next year’s planning efforts that are fast upon us. 

1. Translate Business Objectives Into Quantified Customer Goals  

The first and most important part of doing more with less is to remain diligent in driving business outcomes with a customer-focused lens. All activity should point directly at delivering business value for the short and long term. Ensuring you have customer-focused goals based on acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell and making your brand worth paying more for is the foundation to maximize resources.   

Once you have set your goals, you must regularly track and align your efforts to the business outcomes your organization expects marketing to influence or drive. To do this, we recommend developing a leading and lagging metrics ladder and establishing quarterly check-ins with your team. By doing so, you will know what is working in your marketing plan and feel more confident that every element of your marketing budget is maximized and driving ROI. And if you notice that marketing efforts are underperforming, you’ll be in a better position to quickly pivot your efforts.  

Learn more on how you can anchor your marketing activities and investments in business outcomes in our global research report, Brand and Demand: A Love Story.  

2. Do Fewer Things 

Peter Drucker famously wrote, “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” The same is true with marketers. Every dollar works as hard as possible, but the success of your budget is dependent on whether you invested those dollars appropriately, which is why marketing leaders need to prioritize growth opportunities and continuously analyze and optimize to ensure those efforts are practical and efficient.  

Obvious, right? But in a world where specialists and digital marketing skills are at a premium, many companies are overspending to build executional muscle in modern marketing tactics. But while they are actively improving their search and social skills, for example, they may lose focus on why they are in those channels in the first place. 

Companies can do more things right by doing fewer things and staying laser-focused on driving business outcomes and customer goals. Before greenlighting any initiative, even small ones, you must ensure they support those goals. When calculating the cost of your marketing efforts, measuring the cost in dollars and the resources and time your team needs to invest in executing is critical.   

Here are some key questions to help marketers prune the marketing calendar. If you’re feeling advanced, you can build a scoring system to help you prioritize.  

3. Prioritize Moments That Matter Most in Your Customer’s Journey 

As our Brand and Demand: A Love Story report noted, journey-based planning has become critical in the digitally driven marketers’ toolbox. However, as marketers adopt this concept, many need to work harder to make the most out of every moment in the journey, which spreads resources too thin and splinters impact.   

Studying the journey keeps organizations customer-centric and uncovers opportunities. But to maximize usefulness, marketers must decide on the most critical barriers to address and seize opportunities to build out the signature and memorable moments. 

Prioritizing the moments that matter the most in the customer journey calls for tough choices, especially when you need to do more with less. Marketing leaders prioritizing customer acquisition will likely lean toward awareness and consideration moments, while those focused on retention and loyalty will probably lean toward post-purchase moments. One thing to note when prioritizing these moments is to make a list of those that you are choosing to ignore now. Eventually, marketing budgets will increase again, and the moments you deprioritize can be revisited.   

Once you have prioritized your moments, you must ensure your teams leverage these moments for brand and demand opportunities. After all, doing more with less is sometimes doing two things simultaneously! By doing so, it will be easier for your team to make the right choices about the appropriate channels, experiences and messages you need to serve your customers and, at the right time, to drive results for your organization. 

4. Sharpen Your Value Propositions- Superiority That Matters 

To stay relentlessly relevant and earn customer respect and loyalty, strong brands must deliver meaningful, purposeful connections that appeal to people’s emotions with distinctive brand Purpose, Promise and Principles. At this point, many brands clearly understand why they exist and what they do. Still, in this low-spending climate, where every dollar counts, brands should revisit how they think about functional benefits, quality and superiority claims.  

When budgets and resources are constrained, it is a best practice to revise and sharpen your demand-based value proposition at the umbrella brand and product level, ensuring that product-level promises are crisp, compelling and competitive.  And, even more than that, based on things that your target audience can experience. Superiority in the lab or around the margins is one thing, but superiority that people can see and feel, that makes a real difference is another thing. Weaving those promises to reinforce and inform the brand story, and vice versa and ensuring that they are reflected across all in-market executions can boost short-term revenues, even as they support long-term brand health.   

Revisiting your value proposition may mean returning to tried and true basics while challenging assumptions within your organization. It can also result in your team reconsidering old-fashioned benefits and features to sharpen your customer value story, which should evolve and grow as your customer needs change. 

As you do so you should think through these critical questions: 

1. What are the specific tensions, meaningful benefit pillars and proof points that are critical to deliver on the brand promise?  
2. Do these need to change for different customer audiences?  
3. How can we uniquely deliver superiority that matters to customers?  
4. Are our proof points ownable and tangible?
5. Are the brand and demand value stories tightly interwoven? 
6. How can you test and learn before market scaling? 

5. Give Your Creative Assets a Make-over  

In recent years, much of the focus for marketers has been on where and how communications are delivered. It’s impressive how far many have come as they build expertise in performance marketing, owned and earned media, SEO and SEM.   

But many people forget that data shows the success of a campaign is dependent on the quality of the creative. Brilliant campaign ideas and breakthrough experiences are a must-have. Creative work at every point in the journey needs to be branded and rooted in demand-based product truths. It’s not enough to love an asset on the drawing board. It has to stand out in the specific context in which people will discover it. 

During times when you need to do more with less, it’s a good step to build upon your basics. Below is a sampling of a few ways you can do this: 

• Add more demand marketing strategies to your top-of-funnel efforts. 
• Dial up your brand messaging during the purchasing stage of your customer’s journey.  
• Sweat your call to action (CTA). You should vet and optimize your CTAs, even if you’ve used them a million times.  
• Ensure every experience and touchpoint leads your customers to the next milestone in their journey and propels them to the conversion and loyalty stages.  

On a side note, many marketers are integrating AI into their creative process to drive efficiency in their process and execution. We will touch on this more below. 

6. Leverage AI to Do More With Less

AI and machine learning, have played a critical role for marketers for several years. After all, both power programmatic buying, personalized messaging, predictive analytics, buy-now recommendations and chatbots.   

But, with the recent rise of ChatGPT and generative AI tools, businesses have begun experimenting with new ways to increase productivity and effectiveness. It’s becoming clear that the marketing teams that leverage AI tools can magically add more hours to their days.   

While we are at the beginning stages of this new evolution of generative AI, we have identified four key areas of AI that can help support your marketing efforts and teams today. 

AI is evolving fast, and marketers must remember that what they learned last week is outdated. Yet even in its infancy, it has the potential to save money, free up hundreds of hours and improve effectiveness. 

7. Elevate Scenario Planning  

It sometimes feels like we are working in patchy fog. Will the “vibecession” give way to a real one? Will do more with less  be the bumper sticker for just a few more quarters or the foreseeable future? No one knows. But effective scenario planning can mean the difference between simply surviving unexpected curveballs or thriving because of them. It’s the difference between mourning and moving.  

People often think of scenario planning as dealing with the long-term future for outcomes that are years away. But why not use it for the near term to proactively address scenarios that may jeopardize the ability to reach any prioritized goal? It can even be used at the level of an individual initiative to ensure quick response to in-market performance.  

Think of scenario planning as a game. A game board like the one below can be used to help with thinking ahead on owned-asset performance. We recommend building a cross-disciplinary team to scenario plan for your next launch, campaign or initiative. You can use this gameboard to strategize how you might react to potential scenarios, such as shifting media spending, changing messaging or revisiting content and social strategies.   

From there, teams can think about how best to codify and socialize the contingency plans, including the owners of levers. 

The job isn’t over when the game board is completed. Identifying when, how and who is responsible for tracking and implementing is critical. Additional cross-functional planning sessions can allow follow-up on hot topics and assign owners to chosen levers.   

Learn more about scenario planning in our recent AMA article. 

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Amy Scissons is the Chief Marketing and Communications officer at Russell Reynolds Associates, overseeing global marketing and communications for the leading executive search and leadership advisory firm.  

Scissons previously was at Mercer, where she served as Chief Marketing Officer and led marketing operations in more than 100 cities and 41 countries for the global human resources consulting firm. She brings over 20 years of experience across several industries and global markets. Scissons specializes in integrated marketing, demand generation, customer-centric digital and data-driven marketing and leading high-performance teams.  

Mat Zucker: Given the disruption of the last few years, marketers are often being asked to take on greater accountability to demonstrate immediate impact and ROI of marketing investment while creating tighter alignment with the business outcomes. Has that been your experience? If so, how have you shifted your strategy to show impact? 

Amy Scissons: The expectations around marketing delivered ROI have evolved since taking the role. Previously, this role was focused on communications and driving colleague engagement, but now it’s shifted to driving topline growth for the firm while carving out greater differentiation within the market. In particular, professional services and leadership advisory is a relatively homogeneous marketplace as we deliver similar services to our competitors. Differentiation is key to ensuring we continue to win in the market.  

To measure our impact, we look at marketing-attributed revenue, particularly inbound leads driven by digital or other channels. We also look at how effectively we sell differentiated service bundles tied to our client needs. To measure the success of our business development enablement, we look at win rates and the service portfolio’s overall growth.  

MZ: Within your organization, how do you partner with other internal business units and teams to unlock new opportunities for driving growth? Has this evolved in recent years?   

AS: Growth opportunities are a shared responsibility among business development, strategy and marketing. For example, our strategy team will identify organic growth opportunities. At the same time, our client-facing colleagues will highlight new business challenges our clients face, while marketing will use data and digital to identify new growth opportunities based on engagement. We collectively evaluate them as an organization and action them accordingly.  

MZ: Last year, we published a report, “Brand and Demand Marketing: A Love Story,” which speaks to the tensions between brand and demand marketing and why working in silos harms performance. Both are critical functions that need to work together to enable success. How do you balance brand and demand within your marketing organization?  

AS: Within our marketing and communications organization, we made a significant shift to our operating model and chose to build out more specialized roles within the team. This shift has changed how we can execute and the speed at which we can deliver. As a result, we are becoming much more creative in presenting our insights and data, which gives executives ways to interact with our insights and take them to the boardroom. For example, we may not always win the thought leadership topic game, but we can win on how we deliver our thought leadership. By shifting how the team is structured, we’ve become more agile, allowing us to do some brand, demand, and business development enablement work.  

 MZ: Now that you have this new operating model in place, are people still wired in the old way, hybrid, or have they fully embraced this new way of working? 

AS: Yes, we have adapted nicely to the new way of working, though it took time to map out workflows and ensure team members trust one another to deliver their part of the work. The briefing process is key every time we take on a new project. We establish the “why” of our project and challenge ourselves to think of creative ways to deliver the work.   

MZ: What kind of feedback do you get from your people regarding their careers and where they are in their journey? 

AS: We are a relatively new team. We are in our second full year as a fully formed marketing leadership team. We are all excited about the work we are doing. I give my team a lot of autonomy and space to innovate. Some of them are interested in AI, so they have dedicated time to play around with these tools. With AI, I’ve told them first to find a really small way to use it so that they can show the organization that we are thinking about it. The team quickly came up with the idea to build screensavers with our logo using AI, and now our consultants have this up on their desktops. Little things like that help build energy around innovation and move the organization forward, which excites the team. It feels like a small thing, but it gives people permission to experiment.  

MZ: Our research found that experimentation and a test-and-learn mindset are not nice to have but a must-have because if you only use benchmarks to measure success, you will fail. How does this concept sit with you? 

AS: I 100% agree. We do things we would never think to invest in as experiments and are always surprised to see the growth and opportunities that emerge. For instance, our Redefiners  podcast has been incredibly successful, but we did not predict that would be the case. I never thought we would see 25,000 downloads per episode in the first or third season. And because of this test, our podcast has become a successful investment in the Russell Reynolds Associates brand and is now a fully operational demand-generation tool.  

Test and learn is built into how we work. Some tests did not perform that well. For example, we thought this really cool digital pitch tool would completely change our win rate, but it didn’t, so we pivoted and killed it quickly.  

MZ: What big takeaway do you want to share with other CMOs and marketing leaders?  

AS: Creating an environment and a team that can be very agile is incredibly important, but you need to make sure you also have the right technology to support it. After all, much of your budget goes to your marketing technology stack. Having the right operating model is also important. You need to create a model that enables your marketers to work and act differently and not get stuck in the ways of working that are not working. It’s essential to challenge the organization, innovate, do things competitors aren’t doing and let ideas come from everywhere. Because my team is so agile, we can act on and respond to new ideas and bring them to market faster. 

MZ: What are the biggest challenges you believe other CMOs and marketing leaders face today and will continue to face in the next few years? 

AS: I am convinced that marketing is going through a massive disruption. AI will transform marketing, and the marketers who understand how to use AI, develop prompts and put them in workflows will see a lot of success. The challenge with the CMO role is that it is very broad and has high expectations. You only have a little time to think, transform, and drive change. But the CMOs and marketing leaders who figure out how to use AI in their workflows will be more productive and thrive.  

About Mat Zucker 

Mat is a senior partner and co-lead of Prophet’s Marketing and Sales practice. He helps clients transform digitally, finding new areas of growth in marketing, content and communications. Previously, Mat was the Global Executive Creative Director at Razorfish, served as Chief Creative Officer at OgilvyOne New York and held leadership roles at R/GA and Agency.com. In addition to helping clients creatively connect and engage with their customers, he hosts two podcasts, Cidiot and Rising.   

Are you interested in talking with Mat? You can contact him, here. 

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Chiaki Nishino: Given the disruption of the last few years, marketers are often asked to take on greater accountability to demonstrate immediate impact and ROI of marketing investment while creating tighter alignment with the business outcomes. Has that been your experience? If so, how have you shifted your strategy to show impact?  

Theresa McLaughlin: It is a very interesting time to be the global head of marketing especially when considering the evolution of digital transformation. When I was at TD Bank Group, the organization’s investment in third-party digital increased from 5% to 50%. Now it’s shifted to first-party digital investments.  

When the digital transformation first began, it wasn’t about brand storytelling but performance marketing. It quickly became a competition of performance marketing versus brand marketing. And that probably needed to swing in this direction to ensure there was a return with performance marketing investments.  

But when COVID hit, the proliferation of content in the media became intense, and organizations needed to shift to build more authenticity.  

Given all I have seen, I’m a big believer in brand and demand. I want to ensure that my budget in brand, individual business unit marketing and incremental campaign budgets are all looked at through an integrated model of brand and demand. Ultimately, I want to drive the brand into the product experience and the performance marketing strategy.  

CN: How have conversations with your C-suite and board changed as you take on new accountability in driving and proving business value?   

TM: There absolutely is pressure to demonstrate ROI, but as the global head of marketing, my job is to lean into storytelling. For example, we pull together the story and data in the right way, to show how we are influencing the full-funnel experience for our target audience and clients.   

When communicating the brand investment, I lean into classic upper and lower funnel brand metrics, but brand is about what clients say it is, not what we tell them. Therefore, metrics like NPS really matter when talking about the brand experience. I expect tough questions from across the executive team, so I lean into data to tell the story that proves marketing’s ROI. What got us here is not going to get us there, which is why we are making the case for brand investment. 

CN. How do you partner with other internal business units and teams to unlock new opportunities for driving growth, and how has this evolved in recent years?   

TM: T. Rowe Price is a global organization, so sitting within that global distribution organization is essential.   

When partnering with my sales organization, I’ll start by standing up with the sales management team and collaborating on initiatives such as lead management, product marketing and positioning, and RFP management as just a few examples. Cross-functional leadership is crucial not just for marketing but to deliver better business outcomes that truly meet the needs of our customers.  

CN: In our research, we found that effective marketers work to build modern marketing organizations and experiment to win. Do you have any examples you can share where you’ve been able to implement these two principles effectively?   

TM: At T. Rowe Price, every part of marketing is in a constant state of transformation, which is why the principle “experiment to win” resonates with me. We have many opportunities and playgrounds where we can test and learn new strategies and techniques, and our team’s new talent has upgraded our approach to experimentation.   

In terms of building a modern marketing organization, getting your operating model is critical. It is vital to take an integrated approach to the operating model. This is why it’s crucial to be a “T-shaped marketer” who can play a more fluid and integrated role within your organization. To build an integrated marketing org, about two-thirds of our team sit in the center, but a third sits in the business, so we avoid operating in silos and get greater connection points to move our marketing agenda forward with the buy-in from other functional leads.  

In my role, I often see myself as more than just the global head of marketing.  In addition to being responsible for marketing, I need to think about CX, talent, digital, sales, and lead generation – it’s true capital marketing. My role is often that of an integrator, and to do that successfully, I need to convince other functional leads – who aren’t marketers — to find points of collaboration. I often approach this like I would a marketing campaign. It’s all about creating seamless experiences that put the customer at the center of everything we do. 

About Chiaki Nishino  

Chiaki Nishino is Prophet’s president and a member of the organization’s Executive Committee and Board of Directors. In addition to leading Prophet’s North American business strategy, she oversees the organization’s global Women in Leadership and Diversity efforts. She brings extensive experience in growth strategy, customer experience, brand strategy and marketing. She’s led clients in financial services, communication and healthcare to new avenues of expansion. And she’s an industry leader in customer engagement and marketing accountability, having spoken at the Conference Board and the Association of National Advertisers. Before joining Prophet, Chiaki was a Partner at Lippincott Mercer, and worked at Mercer Management Consulting and Dell Computers. Are you interested in talking to Chiaki? You can contact her here.

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