AANA CEO met with B&T to discuss learnings from this year's annual RESET for Growth conference and the challenges facing marketers in the current economic climate.
Lead image: AANA CEO Josh Fawkes
Marketers are currently working hard. With many Australians tightening their purse strings as marketing budgets are squeezed, business costs soar and a cost of living crisis weighs on consumer confidence, many are under pressure to drive growth. exposed.
This year's AANA RESET for Growth conference examined how marketers can drive growth during this difficult economic reality.
Almost all sessions are B&T Attendees will learn how leading brands and their senior marketers are finding creative and effective ways to drive growth across earned, owned, shared, and paid media, and how We demonstrated how we are driving top-line performance.
AANA CEO Josh Foulkes told B&T that the challenges facing many (but not all) senior marketers are that the cost of doing business has significantly increased (e.g. rising raw material and transportation costs). He said the key is how to grow the business.
We do not pass these costs on to consumers. That would have a knock-on effect on business demand and inflation.
“Two challenges in particular when it comes to many FMCG and other businesses in Australia are declining consumer confidence and flat growth due to inflation, and the other being significant increases in the cost of doing business, which can sometimes be as low as 30%. Sometimes it's about the dollar. It's a percentage increase in raw material costs,” he said. “This is an unprecedented challenge that they have never seen before.
“This means that when sales are flat because consumer confidence is down or not as strong, consumer spending is flat and business costs are rising, margins are under pressure and there is a lot of scrutiny from finance teams. pressure increases,” and CFOs reduce overall costs.
He added, “What I've always said is that you can't achieve that kind of growth by cutting marketing costs. You have to be clear about the value of your marketing investments.'' Research shows that brands that invest in marketing during tough times and economic downturns perform significantly better than their competitors during recovery.”
Reset target audience
One area that marketers should reconsider is who their target audience is and whether they should focus on older demographics where younger cohorts have traditionally been ignored.
Author and futurist Bernard Salt made this point in a context-setting presentation to kick off this year's RESET.
Compared to many other OECD countries, Australia has many advantages: it is one of the wealthiest countries, has a rapidly growing population, and is multicultural.
“He asked marketers and businesses, 'Is the traditional way of segmenting and targeting customers the right way to go right now?'” Foulkes said.
“We need to look at what is changing when it comes to our demographics.
“The interesting thing is with baby boomers and people who don't have a mortgage but often have more financial resources.'' 'Let's target the younger demographic.' But shouldn't companies start thinking about the other really important demographics that have had a lot of money and a lot less responsibility?'
Foulkes said he aims to unite the industry to promote the value of marketing as a driver of growth and profitability.
Looking back at this year's RESET, here are his five takeaways:
- Marketing in the cockpit: If you want to grow and increase profitability, you need to invest in marketing and make marketing part of your cockpit. This is the message we want to send to business leaders: marketing is not a cost center, but an investment to help your business grow.
- Creativity drives growth: This was made clear during sessions on Lego, Barbie and AB InBev. In Richard's presentation, he found that companies that market creatively and run their business creatively achieve three times more results than those that don't. His presentation showed that they are WARC's top advertiser, surpassing Cannes Lions and Effies for the second year in a row. And he showed me a very clear graph of how creativity helped him achieve rock star growth income.
- The power of partnership: If you look at CommBank's Matildas, Barbie, and Lego, they all spoke powerfully about the power of partnership and how it helped them grow. I liked how it showed the difference between real fandom and paid influencers, and how that fandom creates loyalty. The areas they found most valuable were around earned, shared, and owned media. I thought this was a great insight into how to mobilize partnerships and fans to build an ecosystem of earned, owned, and shared content. This is much more than just paid advertising and media.
- Take risks and embrace failure. I don't think Australia is very good at failure. We are not that kind of culture. But there's an old notion of fortune favoring the brave, and we're seeing entrepreneurs emerge who take risks, embrace failure when things don't work out, and use their lessons to move forward. . It happens more often in cultures like the US, and Nick Taylor was very clear about this in his experience with Lego. I think in Australia we are a little less tolerant of failure. We need to break away from that and embrace a culture where it's okay to fail, learn and move on.
- Dream big. I wish more marketers would dream big and have the unwavering belief in focusing on North Star. That's what Richard was talking about. In Australia, we tend to be a little bit self-deprecating, so we need to be more optimistic about the future and prospects. It's great to try to build more of that kind of optimism and big-dreaming mindset within the industry.
