Marketers struggle to make informed decisions during chaos

by Donovan Neale-May. Facing global disruption, business upheaval and looming budget cuts, marketers must chart a sensible path through a devastating global viral outbreak. Yet, most chief marketers are having to make critical decisions without the support of real-time data insights. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, which has 16,000 members in 10,000 companies worldwide, including in South Africa and across Africa, surveyed its members over the last two weeks to understand the global pandemic’s impact on the global strategies, operations, budgets and outlook.

Key findings show challenging times ahead for marketing leaders:

• 84% of global marketers expect the pandemic will multiply business disruption globally.
• 90% expect to make changes to their marketing plans.
• 66% said they don’t have enough real-time visibility and insight into the pandemic’s impact across both the demand and supply chains.
• 69% are not satisfied with the quality, timeliness and usefulness of decision support data.

CMOs will have to make decisions the old-fashioned way, tapping into their experience and knowledge about the customer and market. To a large degree, they’re already doing this. Marketers feel they’re addressing customer consternation and concern extremely well (36%) or moderately well (56%). Internally, CMOs said they’re faring even better. Two out of three said they’re safeguarding employees and support staff extremely well; and 27% moderately well.

CMOs also feel relatively confident about their company’s ability to weather the storm. Nearly 60% expressed moderate confidence in their company’s contingency, containment and recovery plans, while 31% are extremely confident. Marketing budgets might not be so lucky. Nearly half of marketers are bracing for marketing spending cuts. Another 26% don’t know what’s going to happen.

Donovan Neale-May is Founder and Executive Director, CMO Council. Neale-May is the founder and executive director of the CMO Council. He is also the founder and executive director of the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network, a global community of executive change agents driving business reinvention, IT transformation, and process improvement across the enterprise. Neale-May serves as president and managing partner of GlobalFluency, Inc., the leader in Intelligent Market Engagement, with 70 offices in over 40 countries; and is the managing partner of The Sable Accelerator LLC (SABLE), an international partnership group of expatriate South Africans dedicated to helping South African entrepreneurs.

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