New Decade Old Rules? by Laura Walters

Laura Walters, Recruitment Board Director, has invested her career in carefully curating the right marketing professionals into the right roles and many of the businesses she’s placed in have invested heavily in performance marketing and digital. Here she explores how there are subtle but important changes in the market and how businesses are appearing to go back to brand-led marketing. 

A new decade is upon us. New hope? All Change? Or are we all going back on a what makes Britain great? No, I’m not talking about Brexit but whilst the last decade has been dominated by the rise of digital media and performance marketing, will 2020 and beyond be dominated by a resurgence in brand-led thinking? I think so but in a way that embraces everything we have learned about modern marketing in the digital age and what this means for skills required of modern marketers.

We are blessed in the North of England with many success stories and trailblazers in E-commerce. Businesses such as Booking, AO, Boohoo and On The Beach to name a few have raised the bar very high for others to follow in how you build huge customer bases and revenues in the multi-millions in pure play digital businesses. This has been achieved through aggressive but highly sophisticated customer acquisition strategies and world class UX and design to engage and covert Customers at every opportunity. However as more and more competitors enter in every field, differentiation and share dominance is becoming threatened and the market leaders are all looking how to prevent an acquisition race to the bottom.

Cometh the hour, Cometh the brand. There has never been a greater need for businesses to invest in their brand; why they exist, who and what they stand for. Having a clear purpose as an Organisation that unites employees and the customers they are serving can be very powerful and instrumental in not only providing a compelling and differentiated customer proposition but also in attracting the best talent and a loyal workforce.

In the last few years the emphasis has been on performance marketing and digital marketing for the majority of roles that I have been recruiting for clients. Recently though I have seen an increase in clients looking to hire candidates with a breadth of experience and deep competency in traditional brand building skills. This is combined with a need for a thorough knowledge of sophisticated performance and analytical marketing skills and with the renewed focus in investment in brand building, this is a trend that I see increasing across the board in 2020.

It is apparent that the modern marketer not only has to be a skilled practitioner in the endless pursuit of acquiring Customers for short-term commercial gains, but also in how they understand the whole customer journey and have the ability to develop engaging and unique brand experiences. In other words, in the case of the CMO, the role is rapidly evolving, or should I say reverting, to again being truly the voice of the Customer in the board room and leading the way for how an Organisation aligns and prioritises its strategy around the customer underpinned by a brand strategy that informs everything it does.

The requirement for Marketers to really understand all areas of the marketing mix and to deliver truly differentiated brand experiences across all touchpoints is not the only area where I am seeing convergence. Modern brand thinking is not just about creative identity and integrated brand experiences but also about how the DNA of a business percolates through an Organisation. I am therefore seeing a trend in Human Resource professionals having an increased focus on how they create and promote the culture of their company; their Employer Brand.

How an Organisation is perceived on the inside as well as what Customers see on the outside through their products and services is high on the agenda for the majority of HR professionals that I speak to everyday when receiving briefs on new hires. Cultural fit of an individual is in my opinion one of the primary reasons why a Candidate is either successful or not in securing a role. With the most successful companies I work with I can feel the culture whether I am talking on the phone with a Client or attending a meeting in their offices.

The internal brand and the external one that a customer sees is therefore converging with HR Professionals and Marketeers increasingly working together to a common purpose and set of values in a way that I have not really seen before. It’s obvious to me, it is so much easier to hire for a company that has strong and positive external brand presence which is echoed internally. As one of my HR Clients said, the old adage is back…’Happy People means Happy Customers.’ A cliché I know but it’s good to see Organisations really putting this at the centre of their plans.

So as we say goodbye to 2019 and toast in the next decade, it's fantastic to see that role of the Marketeer is rejuvenating as the lifeblood of an Organisation once more. Digital and data skills are still very much alive but brand is making a coming back as their true partner, new decade, old rules.

Thank you Laura for this amazing insight! If you’re looking for a new job role please call our recruitment team on 0161 833 1044 or email [email protected].

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