Top marketers share their thoughts on Brexit one month on

Pete Markey, brand communications and marketing director at Aviva

Brexit provides a challenge and an opportunity for brands and marketers. With consumer trust declining, the need for strong and confident brands is evident more than ever. With uncertainty, this creates a greater need for confidence and certainty which strong brands can provide. The key balance is for brands to tonally match and appreciate the everyday concerns and challenges customers are facing. My sense is that brands will be looking to focus more on the emotional warmth of storytelling and heritage behind their brands to help build and strengthen confidence and trust – those brands that panic and waver will revert to heavy discounting and promotions which could potentially damage brand value.

So, overall I think this is a real moment of truth for brands to have a confident tone, helping remove customers from the fear of uncertainty.

On discussions with agencies, my sense is that brands need strong agencies now more than ever in order to hold their nerve and not head for short term and potentially brand damaging options. Great agencies should be working with their clients to keep brands “on strategy” but working with them to ensure communications and approach are tonally right post-Brexit and really tap into the latest consumer thinking and mindset.

On budgets, the same theme remains that marketing must keep proving ROI and strong commercial benefit and my feeling is this was going to continue to intensify even without Brexit. Marketing needs to be seen as an investment not an expense and strong ROI data and numeric marketers who understand the key financial levers of a business and the role marketing plays in their success are needed now more than ever.

On talent, the UK remains attractive for marketers and it already has a rich talent pool which I am confident will continue. The UK is at the forefront on digital marketing, social and content and so much more and the strength of creative and media agencies in the UK further evidences this.

Antony Peart, European marketing and communications manager at Brother International Europe

The UK is a powerhouse in global marketing and with good reason. Global brands will continue to want to work with the best British marketing talent, the UK will continue to provide a home to talent from across the globe. It’s also worth noting that global collaboration is becoming ever easier. In many ways there are no borders when it comes to marketing talent.

While these are certainly challenging times, they are exciting times too, with more channels of communication available to marketers than ever before. Brexit will not change that. Nor will it dampen the emerging opportunities for brands to have deeper and more meaningful relationships with the people who buy products and services.

In many ways, it remains business as usual. The agencies we work with are continuing to provide marketing support to sales offices within European countries that are vibrant markets for Brother’s range of products and services in their own right. Effective marketing has always relied upon agencies being attuned to the changing circumstances that consumers find themselves in and I would expect that to be the case in the lead up to, and after Brexit.

Marketing budgets have to be flexible and responsive to change, so it is natural there will be some changes in approach once the full impact of Brexit is clear.

Ultimately, marketers will continue to work with the suppliers who best know their products and services, and use them to produce the best possible results.

Charlie Cooper, communications director at Rapha

"The sport of cycling has a rich European history. It was a love of this history that encouraged Simon to start Rapha. The sport of cycling and business in general will be worse off because of Brexit. Although it may cause some difficulties for business in general, the Rapha brand is stronger than ever and we will continue with our mission of growing the sport of cycling."

Jenny Ashmore, president of the Chartered Institute of Marketers

Now that the country has voted and the new Government has started to set out the plans and timescales to deliver on this new direction, I see the best companies firstly talking with their teams more frequently and via multiple communication channels.

Paralysis is dangerous for any organisation at any time. So ensuring that everyone is working together to keep understanding how to win in changing circumstances is key. This re-engagement of all employees around the organisation’s core mission gives clarity of direction, and there is additional power in sharing historical highlights of the organisation’s ability to evolve and keep delivering in changing external circumstances. The motivational impact of this is clear – and ensures that the talented people throughout the organisation are all focused on how to win going forward.

We also see some individual marketers thriving. Whichever way they personally voted, they have stepped back and realised that this is a massive piece of consumer insight and sets a direction that they need to respond to. They are relishing going right back to the core assumptions of their marketing strategy and P&L structure – they have got straight into working out which drivers and assumptions have changed, plus which might change in the coming couple of years as the legal and trading aspects are negotiated. Likewise, some agency teams are out, on the front-foot, re-assessing how the messages connect with different audiences, and whether segmentation needs to change and evolve for the immediate and likely outcomes.

This puts pressure on clarity and calm assessment, which can be difficult when counter indicators are coming in via all sorts of different newsfeeds all of the time. In a couple of organisations I have seen one or two people take over responsibility to get insight on the key indicators beyond the posturing in the headlines – really seeing how consumer spending is holding up, credit card usage, house sales completions by region etc. This forms a deeper briefing to the business and agency teams, allowing them not to be buffeted by headlines and opinions - but to really track how key indicators are moving over time and how their organisation should respond.

All of these point to the importance of utilising the deep capability in the team and the right external partners to get to well-informed, robust facts and quality plans, and consistent and visible leadership in ensuring that everyone is focused on the right things – with the agility and clarity to call where to move forward vs where to put things on hold, when to pause and when to accelerate.

Richard Robinson, managing partner at Oystercatchers

Brexit – the big kahuna right now for marketers and agencies alike. Do you stick or twist, or do you just wait it out and see if anything actually happens?

Separating fact from faction has been hard for brands since the result was announced because everyone, including the IMF, are still making predictions based on hindsight and expectations of business outcomes vs foresight and a cast-iron knowledge of what’s to come.

And this gives Marketers and Marketing a huge advantage and opportunity. Why? Because Marketing is hardwired to make future-focused decisions based on imperfect levels of information.

The very best brands and Marketers perform at their strongest in times of real change & market flux, or they demonstrate that they can shape and completely dominate the market going forward just as Nintendo has done so brilliantly in the past fortnight. Everyone who said likes and shares weren’t as important as sales just needs to look at the explosive growth in Nintendo’s company value over the past three months to recognise that value comes in more ways than just a sale.

Brexit is heralding a time when Marketers need to do what they do best and listen to their customers. Hear their confusion, angst and in some cases fear – and deliver the calm, measured, strategically focused plans and campaigns for their brands that demonstrate true value and leadership. Customers need to feel confident that their brands have confidence in the face of Brexit, that they have a plan and they know where they’re going.

As a consequence of Brexit Marketers and their agencies need to proactively (and quickly) collaborate on a deeper, more connected level & identify the true purpose of their products at a time when the British public are questioning many of the norms that have taken for granted for decades. Regular people now know they have the power to topple their political leaders, change the future of government & directly influence the economy – the leaders without a plan, or a confused organisational design, or an inability to get their message across through the channels of communication are the ones who we’re seeing being removed on an almost daily basis.

To survive, perpetuate and prosper brands need to get confident, excel at the fundamentals of Marketing, and be clear on their reason & purpose to exist in the new post-Brexit era.

They need to demonstrate to future British and non-British Marketing talent that UK Marketing PLC is still a credible career choice, and that the £80bn that is spent on commercial creativity every year is not about to stop.

They need to convince chief financial officers with pithy commercial strategies that now is the time to invest to shape their success for the next decade. And most of all they need to recognise that nobody has the facts to know what’s coming in twelve months’ time – so it’s time to step up and take charge of their company’s future growth.

Tim Crow, chief executive at Synergy Sponsorship

It doesn’t matter how uncertain the world is people’s passion for what they love – football, music, movies, rugby, the Olympics, ect – they’re not going to stop loving it. So whether you’re trying to target consumers for the first time using that [passion] or whether you’re already doing then it’s going to be a smart move because there are some things in life that don’t change. The other thing is that it [passions] offer people escapism, which has always been part of the appeal [to sponsors] but it’s really going to be part of the appeal now.

The second point is that it’s real buyer’s market right now where those rights in the middle are being squeezed, Rights at the top end like the Champions League and the big clubs are holding their value, while there’s a lot of money going into grassroots but anything in the middle that’s not one of the super-premium assets then they’re increasingly becoming price takers and not price setters. That squeezed middle is becoming bigger and Brexit is exacerbating that.

The third point is that for brands who are facing uncertainty about their rights then this is a good time to renegotiate it on terms that you need or maybe reposition the sponsorship and change the creative. It’s a good time to do this because most rights holders won’t want to be out there looking for a new partner so if you’ve got the right to do it in your contract then it might be the right time to say ‘the situation has changed and we need to change too in order to adapt’.

For all the bargains that are out there you still have to do your due diligence….it may be attractive to look at the short-term quick deals because there are fire sales happening but you’ve still got to do your due diligence particularly if you’re buying assets for three or four years.