The 4Ps of Marketing During a Pandemic

Chandar Pattabhiram, CMO at Coupa 

“How do we market through these unprecedented times and the rise of the “new normal?”

Now that I’ve gotten the references to “unprecedented” and “new normal” out of the way, I want to address the question at hand for all of us in marketing - what should our new playbook be?

When crisis hits, COVID-19 or otherwise, it forces us to reshape everything we had planned: the narratives we can tell and the strategies that will get us there. What worked yesterday runs the risk of coming off as tone-deaf today. It’s clear that we must adapt, and quickly, but how do we do so effectively?

I’d like to propose a framework to help improve your team’s agility in handling these emerging issues. I was recently invited by my good friend Rajeev Batra, partner at Mayfield, for an interactive virtual chat session to share this for our new playbook.

As marketers, I know we all remember Phillip Kotler’s traditional Four Ps of Marketing framework: price, product, promotion and place. But given today’s climate, it might be time to introduce some new Ps: position, posture, programs, and people. Let’s double click.

Positioning

How do you change your positioning when what worked previously no longer fits current events? Here are a few guideposts to help you get started: 

1. Adjust your theme: If your overarching marketing theme was centered around achieving “excellence” with your offering a couple of months ago, it’s time to shift to more relevant, human-centric messaging for the times. This pivot will enable your marketing team to strike a tone that resonates with companies looking to weather the storm or who are in the process of figuring out what to cut. At Coupa, we centered on one sentiment called “resilience” and adjusted our theme from “Unleash Your Business Spend as a Weapon” to “Build Business Spend Resilience.” We subsequently harmonized our #resilience messaging across four areas: our brand messaging, demand generation, sales messaging, and customer stories. We created a framework around the 3 aspects of business spend resilience that organizations need today and promoted it via a new Digital Resilience hub.
2. Tailor your messages: It’s paramount that you take your overall new theme and adjust for each industry you’re marketing to. Right now, the needs of the hospitality industry are clearly going to be very different from the needs of the medical supply industry. Make sure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience. This doesn’t have to be done via a large-scale customization for each industry, but a few personalized tweaks to your overall messaging are critical to ensuring contextual relevance.
3. Think like a Chief Financial Officer: You need to put yourself in the mindset of the CFO, as CFOs are currently in the process of evaluating every software decision as essential…or not. In normal times, CFOs care most about growth. But in times of uncertainty, their focus becomes cost containment and risk mitigation. When you tailor your messaging to your customer’s CFO, you boost your chances for success in this climate. I recently provided this perspective to a CEO, a good friend with a great product in the CRM industry. In better times, his business value messaging would and should focus mainly on showcasing how companies can achieve growth. But right now the focus is on showcasing total cost of ownership savings.

Posture

Consider brand posture and sales posture.

In a crisis, brand posture must shift towards human empathy. The role of the CMO evolves into the Chief Authenticity Officer, whose sole purpose is to ensure everything you’re doing is from a place of genuine, deep empathy. A lot of brands have fallen flat in their attempts at authenticity – in their efforts to sound authentic; they have all ended up sounding the same as this video highlights (see this after reading the rest of the article :-))

What does authenticity mean? It’s not the time to ask customers to talk about how great your product is – that’s going to come across as tone deaf. Instead, focus on telling human stories about how the leaders in your customer community are dynamically shifting their strategies and tactics to weather the storm – stories that can both educate and inspire the community.

Remember, the real challenge lies in staying authentic. While it may go against every fiber of your marketing being, consider telling compelling stories without branding. Brands that do this well put the focus on the heroes, without taking credit or attributing everything to their brand. These types of stories are authentic and demonstrate your brand’s character. At Coupa, we launched a whole new series called Road to Resilience that focused on telling stories of resilience in our community without any active promotion of our product.

Beyond branding, sales posture must change with the times as well. At the height of the 2008 economic downturn, business strategists Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin and Geoffrey Moore posted an interesting perspective on posture in Harvard Business Review. The authors explained that in good times, solution selling works. You ask a prospect, what’s your pain point, after which you listen, understand the problem and provide the best solution.

Sounds simple right? Well, in economic downturns or crises the problems become much more difficult for businesses to identify and understand. So yet again, you must adapt. Your approach should now be provocative: warn customers of the current and future problems they’ll have if they don’t buy your product and make your offering an “essential technology” to proactively solve these. Of course, you must also be sure to assume this posture with deep human empathy.

Programs

During times of crises, you need to adjust your programs to fit your customers’ changing needs. Here are a few recommendations on how to adapt and remain agile:

1. Meet your audience where they are at: In a scenario like the COVID-19 pandemic, where physical spaces are on lockdown, adjust your marketing programs and channels accordingly. No one is outside right now, so shift spend from outdoor spaces such as billboards, to TV ads or digital mediums where your target persona is most engaged. For example, over the past few months we have retargeted physical dollars to our digital dollars on CFO-centric digital domains like WSJ and CNBC.com. The key in this approach is less about shifting from physical to digital dollars (a ‘captain obvious’ approach) but to be hyper-focused only on the right channels of choice.
2. Focus on retaining and selling into existing customers: There has never been a better time to focus on your current customers in order to ensure their continued happiness and success. For example, if you currently spend 20 percent of your time on existing customers and 80 percent on growth, consider rebalancing that mix to 40 percent on existing products and 60 percent on growth. But the key to success is this: it’s important to closely align with sales and jointly select a few “Plays” for your best product offerings for the customers who have successfully adopted your initial offerings and now are in the right stage of their journey to be ready for expansion. Target these with a few “plays” rather than a wide-spread market-it-all approach.

People

Despite addressing it last on this list, the most important focus during a crisis needs to be your people. With everyone working remotely, you need to maintain a feeling of closeness as a team and remain connected while being separated. Companies are getting comfortable with virtual activities including Zoom happy hours, spreadsheet pixel art, costume meetings, donut meetups on Slack and virtual yoga to share, learn and engage #together.

A key area to focus on right now is virtual learning! There is no better time than now for employees to re-channel their commute hours into education. This could be organized a few different ways: external courses on the marketing domain from sites like Coursera or organizations like Decker Communications; focused thought-leadership sessions with internal and external speakers on specific topics ranging from strategy to brand to digital marketing; or finally, peer mirroring sessions where, for example, a traditional field marketer can sit down with a digital marketer and learn about the finer aspects of cross-channel marketing. How do we enforce this learning? Set up tangible goals such as 40 hours of mandatory learning time over the next four months for each employee, and have each manager track it for the employees they support.=

Where do we go from here?

Creating an adaptable and agile marketing program is the goal of the four Ps framework. But some of you might be thinking about a fifth P – Performance. This pandemic has put some companies and industries in a better position than others to hit their targets, and for those facing more headwinds, now may be the time to rethink your own performance and how you would like to be measured. The ultimate measures for a revenue marketing team have always been pipeline and revenue but when the world around us is changing, focusing solely on empirical results may be shortsighted. Consider incorporating emotive metrics, like setting goals for building deeper connections with your community by unearthing and showcasing their stories of resilience.

Putting purpose (and people) on par with pipeline helps us play the long game to survive and ultimately thrive.

#CMO #Marketing #Digital Marketing #Pandemic #Strategy