RECONFIRM THE BUSINESS GOAL

In turbulent markets, the first casualty is often strategic alignment. Objectives set six months ago may no longer reflect today’s business imperatives. When that happens, marketing needs to realign, fast.

The test is simple: Can your KPI stand up to scrutiny in a boardroom conversation? If not, it’s the wrong KPI.
Too often, we optimize what’s visible instead of what’s valuable. That creates activity, not traction. Teams start managing to ROAS as the end goal instead of using it as one indicator among many. They chase CPMs instead of defending pricing power. They report brand lift, but sustainable growth remains elusive.

Strong marketing strategies start with organizational alignment. If Finance and Marketing aren’t operating from a shared definition of success, even the most efficient media mix can’t build long-term value. Alignment begins by

asking better questions, about what the business truly needs, and whether marketing’s definition of performance actually maps to those needs.

That’s also where marketing brings unique value: proximity to the customer. As both a driver of growth and a source of deep customer insight, marketing is often the first to detect shifts in behavior, sentiment, or demand. When that insight is elevated to the enterprise level, it doesn’t just shape campaigns, it sharpens strategy and reaffirms marketing’s role as a growth-driver not a cost-center.

MESSAGING FIRST: THE UNTAPPED MULTIPLIER

In an environment where media investment is scrutinized and results need to show up fast, marketers still under-leverage their most powerful lever: the message.

Creative drives more profit than any other variable in the marketing mix. According to Kantar, moving from a mediocre to a great piece of creative multiplies payback twelvefold. By contrast, the best media-mix adjustment delivers just a 2.5x improvement.1 If budget or time is tight, the most effective move is to tune the words, images, and story, not the settings.

Yet creative still gets deprioritized. Kantar’s research also shows that marketers systematically underestimate creative’s impact, ranking it three spots lower than its actual effect. They tend to overestimate factors like targeting and channel configuration, likely because they’re easier to control.

But no amount of precision or spend can compensate for a message that doesn’t land.

Strong brand messaging has to be noticed, understood, and remembered, and when it is, it does more than lift awareness. It drives preference, reinforces margin and builds pricing power with consumers and partners. Achieving that impact hinges on creative that’s clear, context specific, and platform native. Decide which ideas you’ll craft in house and which you’ll co create with partners or influencers (a low risk sandbox for testing new angles), then tune every asset to the format and voice your audience expects.

Effective creative is clear, relevant, and built to perform in the context where it appears. It adapts to the format, respects the platform, and speaks in a voice the audience recognizes. Increasingly brands must develop a framework for deciding what they create themselves and what they co-create with partners and category influencers. The influencer workstream can be a great place to trial the messaging evolution mentioned above.

Momentum beats perfection. Version quickly. Test frequently. Done well, creative is the multiplier that lifts everything else. And in volatile conditions, it’s one of the few levers still fully within a marketer’s control.

MANAGING IN THE MEDIA MULTIVERSE

The fragmentation of customers’ attention across a multiverse of apps, sites and services over the last ten years has been the defining challenge (and opportunity) of the marketing community. Reach that once came wholesale through a few blockbuster channels now has to be stitched together.

Economist Grace Kite’s “lots of littles” framework flips fragmentation into an advantage. Spreading budget across four or five channels – each serving short, context-specific impressions – can lift ROI by 35-65 % and more than double brand impact, giving marketers a clear roadmap to compound growth even as single-channel reach shrinks.2

Budget cuts are inevitable. But how you respond to those cuts is a strategic choice. What you choose to protect, what you choose to pause, and how you reallocate resources under pressure is where marketing leadership shows up. Three principles matter most in those moments:

Reach, relevance, and resonance also provide a useful lens for diagnosing campaign performance. Many underperforming campaigns aren’t suffering from media problems, they’re strategically incomplete. Some never reach the right audience. Others reach the right audience at the wrong moment or in the wrong format. And some deliver forgettable creative that generates exposure, but no real salience.

Start with reach. Growth doesn’t come from those already in the funnel, it comes from those who haven’t yet looked your way. Over-targeting and over-reliance on lower-funnel segments can make a brand invisible to net-new prospects.

Then relevance. Personalization isn’t the goal – fit is. Format, tone, channel, and timing all determine whether a message makes sense in the context where it appears.

Finally, resonance. Distinctive, memorable creative is what transforms exposure into impact. It’s where business value is captured. Without it, even well-placed media becomes wallpaper.

This is especially true in early-stage firms or fast-moving categories, where performance spend dominates by necessity. But even then, brand investment plays a defensive role: it stabilizes Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), lifts conversion efficiency, protects margin and mitigates the need for discounting.

In leaner times, it’s also essential to maximize owned assets. The homepage, CRM efforts, newsletter lists, and even internal channels become more valuable when paid reach contracts. Integrated well, they maintain brand pressure even when the budget tightens.

Thoroughly review your media mix and execution quarterly. Make it reflect your growth ambition, not just last year’s budget.

TURNING VOLATILITY INTO VELOCITY

The pressure to show results won’t ease just because conditions are uncertain. If anything, volatility raises the bar, tightening timelines, stretching budgets, and heightening scrutiny. The strongest marketing leaders respond by reasserting the value of marketing, not by chasing every metric, but by anchoring their efforts in strategy.

That starts with reconnecting to the fundamentals. Are the business goals still the right ones? Is the message distinctive, relevant, and built to perform across touchpoints? Does the media mix support both short-term performance and long-term brand momentum?

Together, these elements create something more powerful than activity: they create velocity.

Remember, velocity is speed with direction. It’s what allows organizations to move quickly and intentionally toward growth even when conditions are unstable. Marketing plays a central role in that motion. It aligns teams (at its best, it even inspires them) around enterprise priorities. It shapes demand through powerful messaging. And it deploys spend with discipline, balancing efficiency and impact.

The brands that thrive in volatile markets are those that move with clarity, grounded in purpose, guided by signal, and willing to act decisively. At your next offsite (which will likely be an onsite), ask the hard questions: which enterprise goal does each marketing dollar serve? When did we last treat creative as a strategic lever? Are we investing to sustain momentum or simply to avoid risk?

Volatility will persist. But with the right posture, it becomes a proving ground. A space for precision, creativity, and leadership. Marketing doesn’t just adapt to the environment. It has the power to shape what comes next.