Marketing Briefing: More storytelling, same budget? Marketers’ ‘do more with less’ conundrum continues

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Marketers continue to face a familiar conundrum: Do more with less.

Calls from the C-suite have reached a fever pitch over the past year or so, in which marketers are being asked to spin more brand storytelling magic, but without the extra cash to back it up. Those calls have yet to subside all while budgets remain stagnant at best.

In response, some brands, like restaurant chain Sweetgreen and financial services company Northwestern Mutual, are moving budgets as opposed to growing them with an eye toward earned media opportunities and other cost-efficient ways that capture shopper attention without the extra spend. (Neither Sweetgreen nor Northwestern Mutual offered specific budget figures.)

“Marketing functions are all either flat in terms of budget or a little bit reduced. Any CMO should be looking at a budget cut or a flat budget as a positive challenge,” said Lynn Teo, CMO at Northwestern Mutual. 

In early September, the financial institution launched a podcast called “A Better Way to Money,” a content marketing play, according to Teo, that shows up as part of its latest marketing campaign and refreshed brand identity for the company.

It’s a similar story for Nathaniel Ru, co-founder and chief brand officer of Sweetgreen. Brand marketing has always been a core function of the restaurant’s strategy, but has become a bigger priority as of late as the company looks to grow and scale. The company is “moving budgets around versus spending more,” Ru said. 

Perhaps this speaks to the changing role of marketers, namely CMOs, who are increasingly tasked with balancing performance and storytelling to build and maintain a modern brand. In other words, it’s a matter of bridging the gap between short-term goals, or performance, and long-term goals, like brand building. But without the extra dollars, agency execs say brands need to re-imagine what performance metrics and KPIs look like. 

“Brands are now hungry for storytelling, but they’ve gotten used to this re-forecasting exercise where they’re spending the bulk of their media dollars on really ROI-driving pieces of media,” said Jenn Wong, president of MullenLowe West, part of the global MullenLowe agency network.

It could be considered a big ask, especially in the digital age where feedback is instant and return on ad spend is more closely monitored. Brands have to loosen the reins, and be more willing to explore brand marketing channels that aren’t strictly tied to the performance metrics marketers have been holding onto for the last five or six years, she added.

“Every company is going to have different metrics for success. And not all of them actually always translates to sales, which makes it even trickier,” she said. 

That said, the ultimate goal seems to be the optimization of media spending rather than bigger budgets, at least until the phrase “economic headwinds” leaves marketers’ lexicon. Or in other words, make do with what marketers have, thinking more creatively about how to tell the brand story well enough to make new customers aware and bring others back into the fold without additional marketing budgets. 

“The brands that people really resonate with today are the ones that have a pretty strong point of view. It doesn’t have to be political or it doesn’t have to be serious,” Ru said, adding that the initiatives also don’t have to come with bigger budgets. “It’s just [brands] bring you into [their] world.”

3 Questions with Suzanne Cohen, CMO at Kravet Inc., a design company

As brand awareness and storytelling become more important for your company, how does that show up in your media buys?

There is so much competition. So really leaning into our brands’ unique positioning and being memorable is our marketing strategy. Digital, for sure, is really important to us. Each of our brands has a different mix or weight depending on the stories that we want to tell. We’re leveraging our emails. We have a very robust database where we really understand our different customer segments. Being able to really segment our marketing to our customers as well as our social media channels is really important, ensuring that we have a distinction of each brand in each of those channels. I’d say the thing that we’re investing very heavily in is video, being able to use video across all of our channels in our social media as well as on our own channels to help tell that story.

Talk more about the data. How do you find it, use it and measure its effectiveness? 

Because email is such an important channel for us, that is still something that we’re able to get a lot of information around. Traditional metrics, open rate, click through rates, click to open rates, things like that are ways in which we know if [our customers are] responding to the creative, [then]really being able to dig in and look at those analytics. Same thing with social. In our organic social, we’re able to really look at that engagement and even follow our growth and shares and saves, and all those traditional metrics that give us a great indication of if our content is resonating or not.

CMOs are increasingly asked to tie marketing to performance. What does that mean for your role as a CMO?

It’s about being visionary and practical. It’s important that our marketing is impactful. Because digital is so informative and very quick to learn from, we’re able to push the boundaries in our messaging and we can see quickly whether or not it’s connecting with our customers. Finding that balance is really important and measuring it in real-time so that we can quickly optimize if something isn’t really landing well, if it’s not really resonating with our customer, we can pivot, we can make some adjustments.

By the numbers

One of the big conversation points during Advertising Week was the tug of war between brand and performance-led approaches to marketing.

Well, advertising research firm System1 and Britain’s Institute for Practitioners of Advertising have put out a new study that provides ammunition for brand advocates. A sample of 4,000 ads from 56 brands spanning a five year period, found that campaigns that hit the same creative beats were received more positively by audiences and delivered larger brand effects for clients. Additionally:

45%: The proportion of brands in the top quintile for creative consistency that said they had increased market share in the time their campaigns had ran.

3.3: The average rating (out of five) given by audience surveys of ads from the “most consistent” brands, versus 2.8 for “somewhat consistent” and 2.6 for “least consistent.”

1.8X: The rate at which brands running creatively consistent campaigns saw audience ratings for their ads increase year-on-year (audiences rated the ads out of five across a variety of emotional response metrics). — Sam Bradley

Quote of the week

“Any good marketer knows and understands that if you really want to make your audiences fall in love with your product, you need to tell a compelling narrative that makes them fall in love with not just what they’re buying, but why they’re buying it.” — Brandon Baum, otherwise known as Brandon B — the YouTuber who believes agencies shouldn’t worry about AI.

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Marketing Briefing: More storytelling, same budget? Marketers’ ‘do more with less’ conundrum continues

Calls from the C-suite have reached a fever pitch over the past year or so, in which marketers are being asked to spin more brand storytelling magic, but without the extra cash to back it up.