Marketing doesn’t do well with changes.
Marketing is like cats—we like our structure, our habits, our food, our owner. When everything changes in a company, the marketing function is often the first to feel the impact.
But why?
It’s hard to navigate marketing during times of change: we have a job that is highly reliant on planning and organization (hello dear to-do lists fans). The moment we can’t organize things anymore, it basically becomes an avalanche: we know it and we feel it.
When we talk about planning and organization, we also refer to budget management, KPIs, and goals. During changing times, it’s very hard to have clear visibility of the budget, and sometimes goals can seem unachievable (or they are just completely through the roof).
Marketing often plays a central role in everything related to employer branding and often related to the true meaning of belonging to a company and a team.
When that sense of belonging is gone, it’s hard to keep the ship (or the s**t) together.
Lets keep it going: how do you keep your marketing activity going during times of change?
1. Set up clear and achievable goals and budget
Navigating uncertainty is already hard enough. It’s crucial to set up clear and achievable goals and budget for your marketing team. This will provide a sense of direction and purpose even during turbulent times.
Cats don’t do well when they don't know where they're going (cause it usually means they are going to the vet).
2. Review your team’s motivation
Assess your team’s motivation and provide support where needed. Help unmotivated team members to find their path, whether that means staying and finding new motivation or moving on. Unmotivated team members don’t help themselves, the team nor the company, don’t make the situation linger forever.
Conversely, ensure that motivated team members feel valued and supported, they are the ones who need your support the most, and don't get distracted by the negativity.
3. Maintain a positive company culture
Fight every day to keep a positive company culture. Negativity attracts negativity, and this is not just some hippie bulls**t—it’s a spiral that companies can easily find themselves in. A positive environment fosters creativity and resilience.
4. Bring fresh perspectives
Welcome external collaborators, whether it’s outsourced C-Level executives (like part-time CMOs), advisory board members, designers, or literally anyone! Show your teams that something new is coming up. An old and tired team often struggles to bring fresh ideas to the table, it doesn’t mean they are not good at their job, it often means they are just quite tired.
At iytro we have a insider look into marketing change management
We won’t say we saw it all, but we did indeed venture the most different life stages for quite a few companies. We saw Earth, Wind and Fire could be a fun way to sum it up (Do you remember?)
We worked with companies in a hyper-growth phase who didn’t want to hire their CMO too fast and risk making bad decisions, we worked with companies doing not so great undergoing layoffs and redundancies who needed a fresh new marketing perspective.
We worked with big teams, small ones and no marketing at all.
None of them enjoys change.
No marketeer wakes up in the morning to tear down years of work and build everything from scratch again, it’s hard.
Getting real: 3 examples of how we manage change management in marketing
A full rebranding on +10 years company
Refreshing, or better fully redoing a company’s brand identity after 10 years is quite a big challenge, and to lead this type of change you need to behave like you as a CMO are literally the change. People are easily motivated by rebranding as, let's be honest, it’s quite a cool project to work on, so where’s the change management?
Well everywhere, from the whole website, to all the assets, to the events, Social Media, every cm of the previous identity needs to be changed.
This is not a one-person's job, we had Art Director, Designers, Web Developer, Brand and Content with us. That's the advantage of working with our composable marketing set-up, you get the best for each skill you need.
A restructuring of a marketing team from scratch
When you organize your marketing team for a 150+ employees company your team doesn't necessarily look like the marketing team of a startup, you grow bigger and sometimes, slower and slower without any good reason.
When I restructure a team I have one goal: make it lean and efficient. No need to hire 10 people to do great marketing, with a 5 people team (and sometimes even 3) you can get very good results while protecting your EBITDA.
Remotivating a team after redundancies
Though times often means lower motivation and employee engagement, which is everything you don’t need during tough times, but guess what? We’re humans.
I do believe that people seek many practical things in a job (paying bills being one of them, of course) but a team also wants to be part of a bigger project and knowing that they belong.
There’s nothing better than an ambitious new project to re-foster a team together, some of them will stick around and some of them won’t adhere, but that’s okay, and some of them are actually doing you a favor.
That’s why navigating change management in marketing is so hard, you’re not just changing marketing strategy, you’re changing how people belong to a group called a team, and ultimately a company.
Change management in marketing is a major company culture change, not a walk in the park.
Don’t postpone difficult conversations, cause they are the ones that will make your company grow.
