Notes from a marketing round table

I recently attended a very interesting round table event with senior marketing executives from Microsoft, Toshiba, SAS, Global 360 and McAfee among others. The conversation covered the impact of the recession on how their marketing teams operate.

Most people agreed that as marketing teams have been cut, and the workload on the remaining staff has increased, maintaining staff morale has become a major priority for team leaders and managers.

Another interesting change is that as development budgets have been reduced, product lifecycles have been extended. For marketing, this means that teams that were almost exclusively launch focused, getting one product out of the door and moving straight on to the next launch, they now have to sustain demand for products over a longer period. This involves running mid-life kicker campaigns and other activity that some marketing teams, especially in consumer hardware markets may not have been involved in for several years.

Alliance and partner marketing campaigns are now much more in favour than they were 12 months ago. As budgets have been squeezed, it makes sense to combine resources with a close partner and run joint campaigns on a shared cost basis. Of course, there are many other upsides to running good partner campaigns but it was generally agreed that few marketing agencies are strong in this area.

Everyone in the room was working harder to justify their marketing budget with a much greater emphasis on measurable activity that had a very clear set of success/failure criteria set well in advance. The same was true of customers who now had to produce far more detailed business cases in order to get budget approval on major capital purchases approved by their board. This meant marketing having to work more closely with sales to provide them with the more focused and more detailed collateral required to support the sales cycle.

Outside of the public sector, environmental messaging has been toned down because it is harder to convince businesses that “green” products have a strong, short term ROI. Messages about consolidation and virtualization are now more focused on the reduced cost aspect of simplifying your IT environment with less emphasis on the reduced power consumption and reduced carbon footprint.

The general feeling was that things have now stabilized and they were likely to be operating in their current form for the rest of this year with things starting to change in the first half of 2010. It was a very interesting meeting and the overall feeling was positive although everyone agreed it will be a challenging year and hitting targets will require lots of hard work.