How can marketing drive business growth?

Marketers face a bucket load of challenges and must choose between a wealth of potential solutions and options to solve them and drive business growth. WFA spoke to global marketing leaders to identify the one thing that they thought was essential for marketers to be doing to accelerate growth for their brands today.

Their “one thing” fell into a number of areas ranging from making the case for investment to staying closer to the consumer, and from focusing on marketing fundamentals to working across the organisation better.

Some leaders argued that marketers needed to be stronger in fighting against the mantra that they should do more with less and make the powerful case that cutting budgets leads to a drop in demand creation.

“What we see now certainly is that coming off the back end of COVID, the investment around brand is massively important. I would say the emphasis on creativity that drives business impact is a focus for us as an organisation,” said Tad Greenough, Global Chief Creative Officer at Pernod Ricard.

Alberto Hernandez, Chief Growth Officer at Opella, had a slightly different take arguing that putting marketing at the decision-making centre of an organisation was critical. “I would say that the one message would be to influence the board. You know, we sometimes lose ourselves in our own world, and, actually, we're missing the point regarding the fact that the decisions are being taken, the big decisions are being taken somewhere else. So your impact in the organisation has to be measured by the voice that you have in the board discussions.”

Taide Guajardo, Chief Brand Officer at P&G Europe, agreed that business impact was the number one measure. “We often get distracted with so many KPIs that are secondary, which are ways for us to know if we're going into the right direction. But if you get anchored into the impact that we're looking to get in terms of sales, profitable sales, to start with, and then from there, follow the KPIs,” she said.

One leading marketer added the function needed to get better at working across organisations because real growth doesn’t just happen from marketing, it requires collaboration. “It cannot be just a message to the marketers. I think they can't win it all on their own. So I think it's a message for marketers to drive this message across their organisation,” said Preeti Srivastav, Group Head of Sustainabilty at Asahi Group Holdings. “We cannot operate in a silo.”

A second group put staying close to the consumer as their “one thing”. “Ultimately, if the brand doesn't know why it's here then the rest is is null and void. So the only way to keep that front and centre is being very close to the consumer, to give that voice to what's really on their minds and bring that to life in the context of the brand,” argued Cecilia Weckstrom, Director, DCE Transformation Initiatives at the LEGO Group.

Veronika Kryuchkova, Global Head of Capability Building at The Reckitt Marketing Academy, added that marketers were the people who brought the outside in, really understanding how to engage with consumers, what makes them tick. “My key message to all marketers in the world will be, just continue your obsession with consumers, their needs, desires and pain points, and the rest will come,” she said.

A significant third group urged their peers to stick to the marketing fundamentals. “My main message would be not to neglect the marketing fundamentals about constant consumer centricity, creativity, brand building. Everything that the essence of the marketing should not be neglected. And then you can look at how to augment that with AI platforms but really go back to the basics and fundamentals,” said Anouck Bizien-Mourgue, Global Head of L’Oréal University for Augmented Marketing & Communications.

“We often talk about the more complex topics in marketing, but if you've not got the fundamentals of your positioning insight and the right team set up in your organisation who are properly trained, then you can't deliver any of that annual struggle as the world keeps on changing. I think marketers need to get back to basics, focusing on how you're going to deliver growth through creativity and proper advertising,” added Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer at System1.

Finally, Jiunn Shih, CMO at Driscoll’s, echoed that argument with a call to arms. “Marketing is still one of the most strategic competitive advantages for most businesses in the world,” he said. “When we do our job right, we create tremendous value for our organisations.”