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The year is well underway and for many organisations, particularly in the world of FMCG, business is not getting easier. For many, inflationary cost pressures and raw material scarcity has led to leaner marketing budgets or innovation resources being redeployed to focus on reducing complexity and providing supply chain continuity. With these challenges, marketers must not sit and wait until their budgets come back, but instead need to step up to embrace the opportunity at hand.
First, and most importantly, you need to ensure the consumer is at the heart of every business decision. At Mars Petcare, we’re reminded of this every day as we’re guided by our ‘five principles’. The first, quality, focuses on delivering the best for our consumers in service of our purpose, creating a ‘Better World for Pets’. Every month, there are roughly 50 million searches from pet parents across Europe looking to find information on how to look after their dog or cat. Our marketing team is uniquely placed to listen to them and ensure much loved brands such as Pedigree, Sheba and Whiskas meet their needs.
Yet it is not enough to simply listen to consumers, we need to act. Every business function, from supply to commercial to sales, should be making decisions which are in service of better meeting consumer needs. Now more than ever, marketers need to widen their sphere of influence acting with a ‘total enterprise mindset’ to impact every department. Here are a few examples of how.
1. Leading beyond content and innovation
With higher business costs, organisations are exploring where they can simplify their businesses, mitigate costs or increase productivity. Marketers need to ensure they are not just seen as the function for content and innovation, by intentionally leaning into wider business questions.
For example, if a business is exploring portfolio simplification, knowing what consumers value and what they don’t through robust consumer research…
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