Takeaways:
- Nearly half of marketing professionals reported significant budget and team cuts.
- Large businesses are most affected by these cuts.
- Marketers struggle with reduced focus on brand awareness, competition with sales teams, and challenges in defending their role.
- Marketing consultancies play a crucial role in supporting in-house teams with strategic insights and integration of sales and customer service.
Uncertainties and low morale in the Marketing Landscape
Marketing Week’s 2024 Career and Salary Survey is out! And on top of the usual yearly updates on innovative marketing-related jobs, an expected insight sounded the alarm within our industry:
- Half of marketing professionals questioned (47.7%) said they experienced major budget and team cuts over the last 12 months.
- Furthermore, large businesses are the ones which were impacted the most by the unwanted trends.
After difficult pandemic years and the uncertainties surrounding the global economic landscape, this news comes as a final stroke among marketers who spent the last years working relentlessly on brand rethinking, performance marketing and improving their digital footprint, and whose morale is potentially as its lowest since the global financial crisis of 2007.
In-House Marketing Teams Under Pressure
In-house Marketing teams are facing great challenges ahead. Senior management are looking up to them to generate quick results, often at the expense of brand awareness which feels too long-term. Instead of working together, they are more and more put in competition with Sales divisions on “who should get the available budget” to drive business growth. They have trouble defending their work as only a handful of people really understand the importance of marketing within their organization and even less are coming from a marketing background within their Senior management team. Finally, with the rise of Generative AI and automated workflows, some of their key expertise like Storytelling and Creativity are starting to be questioned in a world where Data is mistaken for Content.
Do we still need Marketing?
Marketing and Communication are notoriously the first budgets to be cut. For decades, our industry has tried to reason internal stakeholders with limited success. Once and for all, let’s go back to the basics: without Marketing, there is no Branding; without Marketing, there is no Selling.
The Critical Role of Marketing Consultancies
The ecosystem of marketing consultancies has a key role to play here. As groups essentially composed of marketing professionals, we know the value we create for businesses, and we work as one team capitalizing on the expertise of each to define new ideas and methods. Together we explore new frontiers. Together we learn and improve.
This is an environment that only a handful of in-house marketers can experience. As small teams being part of wider groups, they have neither the resources nor the internal support to keep the pace with our evolving world.
Charting a Path Forward
This is our mission to defend them by nourishing them with the in-agency knowledge we gather and the know-how we create. From strategic planning to performance reporting, we need to be there at each step by going above and beyond marketing basics: providing insights that can change the perception their company has of their own industry, finding new competitive advantages to leverage, and developing ideas, activities and processes that integrate Sales and Customer Service teams to generate tangible impact.
Only then will we be able to ensure that their job brings value to their company, and by extension that our very existence as agencies still plays a role in shaping consumer perception and the economy.
For more marketing insights, check out our magazine page or reach out to our team today.
