Reforming Performance to Navigate Uncertainty

It's high time for us to lean into reforming performance.

We need to let some light in on our Performance Marketers Anonymous meetings

Find strength in numbers to escape the Retail Media Mafia

We need to open the doors on Growth Hacker Reform School

It's not your fault. Dark Forces have conspired to build a compelling counter-narrative, a misinformation campaign - ironically, with quite smart branding - to drain value away from brands and agencies.

They've preyed on gaps in the market

Confidence Gaps: a surplus of American exceptionalism.

Competence Gaps: an increasingly untrained marketing workforce**

Fragile Business Models: time & resource pressure on agencies, dramatically increased competition, sap the ability to take principled stands

Novelty & Gullibility: with first-wave social entrepreneurs, equipped with capital, loudly buying their way past historical patterns

Indifference: Unchallenged and unregulated profit motive from media platforms

We need to push back in this moment

With the changing global economic outlook, predictions of sharp increases in pricing on most goods, which leads to challenges to consumer purchasing power, most organizations will be looking deeply at where and how they can prioritize their resources to stabilize their businesses. There will be tremendous pressure to both do more with less, while simultaneously grow consumer's receptivity to increased prices to maintain current trajectories.

The most proven lever for doing that is strong brand building

Strong brands offer many advantages, not least of which is the ability to protect revenue in a downturn. They also create opportunities to more easily stretch into new categories, recruit top talent, and, for some, even provide a sense of community and affiliation.

There will be incredible pressure to consolidate spending, shift into short-term tactics that maximize current sales, increasing ROAS. Compelling hucksters will say it's possible to do so without compromising long-term outlooks. They're wrong.

It's time to rally around the evidence. I wont relitigate the proof about spending in a downturn, it's easily available. Here's a simple, three-part syllabus for our Reforming Performance course, made for this moment.

Stop accepting the binary of Short- and Long-Term approaches. Adopt the evidence-backed nuance of investing for LIFT (capturing incremental current demand) while investing for LASTING impact (broad-based, emotional tactics that do both - capture current demand more efficiently and build future demand).

Measure holistic effects. Markets are complex and will be more dynamic than ever as brands change tactics in line with organizational strategies. Don't get myopic with focusing solely on owned-brand metrics; measure globally against competitors, watch for macro factors that dramatically grow/shrink/pressure your whole category, and adapt accordingly.

Be human. Brands are built with attention, emotion, and memory. Understand that people are complex, and will increasingly be operating with different levels of anxiety, uncertainty, optimism, and hedonism. There's no one right note to hit. Be sensitive to the moment, the market, and create messages and stories that are empathetic first, and always meant to help not hurt.

While it would be easy to turtle inwards in this moment, it's much better to rally together a coalition of the curious.

If anyone needs support for making this case for their brand leadership, give me a shout (DMs if you're shy). Christopher Ferrel , Christopher Owens , and the effectiveness-trained StratCo at TRG can help.

**Despite the increasing availability of training programs like Magic Number's magic works, James Hurman's Master of Advertising Effectiveness, Mark Ritson's MiniMBA , Karen Nelson-Field PhD's Mastering Modern Media, And Orlando Wood's Advertising Principles Explained - a.p.e (among others), the industry remains bereft of an appreciation for and reliance on training, standards, and professional rigor. As Grace Kite has recently pointed out, Marketers, especially in the UK/US are largely untrained for their current roles (23.9% in the UK, 27.5% US say they've received formal training in marketing).