CMO Concerns Not Addressed During the Pandemic's Peak

Over the past year, most CMO’s have been juggling a variety of issues. Beyond generating sales, some of the most important dealt with shaping brand image to fit a desired corporate culture and spirit of helping others…employees, customers, suppliers, neighborhoods and so forth. As you know, this requires a complex matrix of strategic planning, internal education/buy-in, engaging/authentic messaging and much more. A good example of this might be Walgreen’s “Take Your Shot” campaign with John Legend as their spokesperson.

During this period, more common issues faced by CMO’s included: 

• Adjusting budgets to reflect significantly lower sales
• Developing new products/services to accommodate different patterns of consumer purchase behavior
• Optimizing your marketing mix to reach consumers at different levels of the sales funnel
• Shifting from high level broadcast campaigns to more e-commerce/DTC/digital easily tracked “paid” media efforts
• Taking advantage of efficient “earned “social and public relations initiatives
• Adjusting workflow, systems and methods of tracking progress/results given layoffs, work from home mandates, etc.

Hopefully, all above is under control. Perhaps now you can address some underlying issues that may also have been bothering you:

• Did your external resources/agencies “deliver” during this tough period?
• Did you see that formerly successful briefs/strategies/tactics were not as effective?
• Did you observe that upon reviewing agency performance your resources were under-delivering?
• Do you need stronger social/viral/PR support?
• Was agency compensation during Covid adjusted to reflect a different Scope of Service than originally planned?
• Might you be better suited to having one AOR…or need multiple niche agencies…or perhaps one smaller resource to shake things up?
• Who has been or should be leading marketing mix/budget allocation/messaging /communication and integration… and at what cost to your brand(s)?

Finally, as everything above comes together, perhaps with the assistance of an outside consultant, meeting your key KPI’s and a desired ROI will be the outcome for 2021!