Marketing through uncertainty: How a crisis marketing strategy can build a better marketing organization

If you work in marketing, you’ve probably felt the strain these past few months. You’ve likely asked yourself: How should I market during a crisis — or right now, during the multiple crises the US is facing? You’re dealing with new risks: insensitive or non-empathetic marketing could do great damage to your brand, making it seem out of touch or insensitive. 

You’re also facing greater pressure than ever. Many clients and customers may be desperate for the products and services that they most need — and cautious about spending on anything else. Management likely has been urging you to cut costs and may even be questioning your immediate impact.

My team has notched up a few successful lessons while addressing the risks and the pressure. We’ve also reinvented ourselves as more effective, more agile, lower cost, and more prominent inside our company. In addition to maintaining a “People First” philosophy for every internal and external decision, three key ingredients took us there.

Technology for the pivot

When the pandemic caused its wave of lockdowns and economic disruption, within two weeks we put together a survey of Fortune 1000 CFOs to measure the impact COVID-19 was having on their businesses and the economy that became a global reference, garnering national and international media attention. 

How did we do it so quickly? For a start, we didn’t have to move to the cloud, because we were already there. Pre-COVID, we had not only video chats, but workflows, upskilling, and collaboration all digitized and ready for remote. That made the shift to full-time work-at-home seamless. If you have the right tools and skills, you get a lot more done digitally than through endless presentations in conference rooms.

It helped that our whole company had already made digital upskilling and technology a $3 billion priority commitment. It also helped that our practice developed new products, like an automated contact tracing app, ready to go to market. But it was absolutely critical that we marketers had the tech and the tech skills to take the lead — and our new MarTech stack provided real-time impact metrics as well as AI-generated insights to keep fine tuning our campaigns. And above all, maintaining open lines of communication and trust were key.

Centralize to do more with less

Are you in a complex, multi-functional company, where every line of business handles its own marketing? If so, like me, you may have had to stand up and demand more centralization. Our COVID-19 marketing response had to adopt a unified voice that was sensitive to clients’ professional and personal challenges as well as the community health and economic problems — not trying to make a hard sell. 

We created a tone-of-voice guide, unique to this situation, that everyone in marketing had to follow, and which a lot of our business leaders also chose to follow. In addition to our normal course of review, we established a new centralized review process and infrastructure for any and all marketing material, so that my leadership team or one of the centralized response teams could read and approve content to make sure all communications were consistent, struck the right tone and aligned with our overall messaging.

Together with the business we executed a wave approach, with a timetable and guidelines: here’s when and how to market crisis management, here’s when and how to market stabilization services, here’s when and how to market strategies for the recovery. 

Fewer projects but better, we decided — and with a big project like the CFO survey, different teams and geographies could insert questions and analysis that reflected their clients’ concerns. Our teams now send out fewer emails to clients too, and we ensure their tone, content, and design aligns to our firm purpose and strategy. 

Turn a crisis into a catalyst

It may be my desire for perfection that had me wanting to have more centralized control over each team’s marketing in our large organization. Through these enhanced processes, our team was able to show the value of this collaboration, and to make a case for change to keep it. Our top stakeholders agreed that this crisis was just too sensitive to risk mistakes in tone or messaging. The crisis was also too fast moving to manage too many stakeholders. So they agreed to this centralization quickly. 

Another priority of our team has been to make us more agile and more aligned with each other and with our functions -- and one of the few silver linings that this crisis has presented is our team’s ability to do just that. When some teams’ work paused because of the pandemic, we were able to redistribute over 25% of our marketers onto rotations with other teams that needed support professionally or personally… and they are so proud to be helping the firm on short-term needs and to help out some of our team members. This new way of working is faster, more efficient, more aligned to the business, and my team loves it, since it’s giving them new networks and skills.

We’re leaders now

As a marketer, you have a real opportunity to help your company navigate this crisis. That’s very satisfying and not a week goes by when a senior leader doesn’t thank me for what we’re doing. Inside my company, there’s no question in anyone’s mind that we’re a great partner for the business, supporter of our clients, protector of brand, driver of revenue, and critical to our organization’s technology-first future.

These times are still incredibly tough for all professionally and personally, and I really miss seeing my colleagues IRL. But this crisis has been an opportunity — to help our clients and our firm while reinventing our team.

What’s next? More focus on technology, less but more impactful overall activities, and more collaboration. And we will use these pillars to help focus on our next mission: doubling down on purpose to help our firm and the business community to address systematic racial injustices. None of these crises can be viewed in isolation, and it is inspiring to see Marketing being a key driver.