Business Resilience and the CMO

• Disruptive events impact customer relationships. Marketing and communications executives are in the best position to assess customer needs in a crisis and determine how to provide support. This customer-centric orientation should be central in organization-wide continuity planning.

• MarCom personnel need to engage in scenario planning to identify the likely customer impact of hypothetical disruptions. Insights from this exercise should be incorporated into the wider organization’s business continuity preparation.

• Marketing and communications organizations must evaluate personnel, processes and technology to ensure they have the necessary knowledge, agility and operational independence to move swiftly and surely when the moment comes.

Q: Everyone enjoys a good doomsday scenario … What are we talking about when we talk about disruption?

Eric: Well, the pandemic was a wakeup call. Covid should open our eyes to the specter of massive disruptions, uncertainty, unexpected events not as a black swan but, simply, the way we live and work today. It’s the “new abnormal,” and every business needs to be more responsive, to game out various scenarios – even happy ones, responding to opportunistic developments. Because if you’re not actively preparing, then your enterprise resilience strategy is basically, “let’s hope for the best.”

A customer-centric approach to disruption planning is not just ‘in case of emergency.’

Q: And just to level set … When did business resilience become more than a business continuity and IT conversation?

Al: Of course, IT maintains a critical role. But IT also has a lot of competing priorities. Marketing can’t take a number and wait for IT to authorize a technology acquisition or implement a large-scale digital support program. If that’s how your organization works, then you’ve failed, because that’s demonstrating to the market that you're not prepared. It’s marketing’s job to be customer-focused, do market research, understand customer needs, and all that. Marketing is customer-centric by design. Resilience should mean helping our customers succeed in both good times and bad, and up until now the “bad” part hasn’t gotten a lot of attention.

Q: Can marketing operate independently of IT?

Al: Yes and no. There are core business systems that IT can and should own; what’s critical is for MarCom to be able to rapidly roll out new customer-facing tools to address whatever the challenge is. It’s not just about technology. It’s about strategy and governance, empowering the right people to make decisions and execute customer-facing programs in a way that promotes confidence.

Q: Is this what Gartner had in mind when they predicted CMOs would supersede CIOs in terms of IT spending?

Eric: Well, Gartner clearly saw the increasing importance of marketing technology and market-focused communications in the enterprise – and in fact, their most recent survey showed that marketing technology expenditures account for more than 25% of marketing budgets, the single biggest category. What we’ve really seen over the course of the pandemic is that marketing technology is the foundation that resilient organizations have used to maintain communications with their customers, partners and employees.

It’s not just a question of who owns the technology. It’s who owns the strategy, who owns the decision.

Q: This seems like, potentially, a huge investment and shift in process for a “could happen” scenario.

Al: Not to be a fatalist, but we’re pretty confident unexpected things will happen. The point is that a customer-centric approach to disruption planning is not just “in case of emergency.” It’s an investment to create a nimbler, better coordinated organization that is more responsive, and can innovate solutions to customer needs that suddenly emerge and get those solutions to market fast. Companies that think this way gain a competitive advantage during a crisis – and, importantly, also in the absence of a crisis.

Eric: Let’s take Zoom. Zoom was able to scale to the next level, and the level above that. [According to Business Insider,] before the pandemic, Zoom had like 10 million daily users; today that number is 300 million. That’s 3000% growth. They were ready for a crisis, and they seized an opportunity.  

Q: If marketing can operate the technology, then what is IT’s role?

Eric: This is a bit esoteric, but there are “systems of record” and “systems of engagement.” For systems of record – core enterprise functions, transactions and so on – IT should be in the driver’s seat. With systems of engagement – social media, for example, or cloud-based collaboration – marketing is the driver, and IT should be in the passenger seat. By marketing, I mean some combination of the CMO, chief communication officer, head of sales, head of digital. And by driving, I mean that marketing’s priorities are being addressed, IT is providing what’s necessary to make it happen, to enable the communications team to be successful.

Al: In a crisis, it’s very easy for IT to say marketing is not a priority, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. But marketing and comms are the primary customer touchpoints. If anything, in a crisis those roles become even more critical.

Q: And a real-world example of this…?

Al: The immediate fallout from the pandemic and business shutdowns. People suddenly out of work and unable to make their mortgage payments. Hundreds of thousands of people calling their banks or their mortgage servicers. The servicers need immediate guidance from the GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises that back mortgage loans] on forbearance, foreclosure, rules around missing a payment. You can see how communications was essential to promoting market stability and averting chaos.

The result is a nimbler, more responsive, better coordinated organization – in any circumstances.

Q: So how do we make sure marketing and communications can be effective during a crisis?

Al: By planning for it. In any given company, the IT function has probably spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on business continuity planning and preparation, as well they should. But the marketing functions have invested closer to zero dollars in contingency planning. They need to look at everything – technology, people, processes – and understand how those will hold up in a variety of circumstances. They are essential, in good times and bad.

Q: And what would that mean, in practical terms – thinking of themselves as essential?

Eric: Well, some crises are predictable, For example, we know there will be hurricanes, just not precisely where or when. Some are not predictable, like a pandemic. So, what are the characteristics your marketing organization requires to respond to the unpredictable? You need to have thought through everything beforehand, you need to have processes in place, you need the right people, roles, skills. Marketing isn’t ancillary. It’s core to the solution. You don’t want to build your systems and processes on the fly – especially if your competitor already has the advantage of a flexible, easy-to-deploy digital engagement model.