Operationalizing Resilience: Preparing Your Marketing Organization for Disruptions

• To be competitive, businesses need a marketing organization that can help customers respond to disruptions. Achieving this capability requires incremental budget, and marketing must be prepared to build a case to secure funding.

• To respond rapidly and effectively for customers, marketing should work with its organizational partners to establish guidelines and boundaries for how marketing can respond in the event of a disruption.

• Marketing organizations should review their staff, capabilities and processes and test them against potential disruption scenarios.

Q: We’ve covered a lot in our resilience discussions. Before we talk about implementation and some of the hurdles the marketing organization might expect, please remind us how marketing fits into the resilience story.

Eric: Resilience can mean many things – infrastructure resilience, digital resilience. And those are all important. But they’re all inwardly focused. They omit something critical: the customer relationship.

Al: A disruption doesn’t just disrupt your company. It also disrupts your customers. And who understands the most about the customer relationship? Marketing. So, when there’s a disruption, IT restores systems, operations restores facilities … and marketing must safeguard customer relationships.

Q: Which is why marketing needs to plan for disruption scenarios.

Al: Correct. This is not something you want to make up on the fly. There’s a template for this: business continuity planning. Every company in the world has a written plan, discussed and approved by stakeholders and executive leadership, that details how to respond to various disruption scenarios. Historically, this planning has been very IT- and ops-focused: How do we get our critical applications back online? Where do we relocate our employees? We are advocating that planning for supporting our customers be addressed with the same importance.

Q: Can you sketch out what this planning looks like?

Eric: Marketing needs to look at a range of disruption scenarios through the customer lens and understand, in each case, how marketing would respond. What customer communications need to go out? Which customer tools, applications and services are mission critical? Are there additional roles that become necessary when you move to a crisis footing? Who plays what role in the response?

Al: It helps to think of your scenario and response planning as a product and manage it that way. The product is resilience. To get that product to market, you interview stakeholders. Develop requirements for your MVP [minimum viable product]. Establish benchmarks and best practices. “Build” your product and test it – for example, run through a mock disruption scenario. And every year, you reevaluate what’s working and run through the process again.

Governance encompasses authority, responsibility, process
and more. It’s like the Constitution: It doesn’t have all the answers, but it
describes how to achieve resolution.

Q: You mentioned stakeholders ... Whom are we talking about?

Eric: Every organization that marketing touches has a stake in marketing’s success, in normal times as well as in a disruption. Product, sales, IT, operations, legal. Compliance and legal are important because in a disruption marketing is going to want to move at high speed to roll out communications and various tools for customers, and it would not be fair to legal to surprise them at the 11th hour. The leaders of all these groups – those are the stakeholders.

Al: Which brings us to the idea of the stakeholder advisory council. It’s a group of your peers you should leverage not just to help you rapidly respond to crises but also as advisors on your day-to-day business efforts. 

Q: Previously we’ve talked about marketing playing by a set of rules, not “going rogue.” That came to mind a moment ago when you mentioned legal and compliance. Is this a good moment to talk about governance?

Eric: Governance also describes the decision-making and escalation framework. Like when there are tough choices to be made about priorities and investment and resources … decisions that require collaboration and cooperation among departments. More mature organizations will call that establishing cross-functional governance. Basically, a cross-functional leadership team empowered to make decisions.

Q: What about organizations that don’t naturally operate collaboratively. How do you overcome that institutional gravity?

Al: Well, this is a great way to start. If you’re not working together, then you’re not truly an organization, you’re a collection of silos.

That’s the real takeaway. If you agree marketing must be more resilient, then you must agree that marketing requires incremental funding.

Q: We’ve managed to get this far without talking about cost. But obviously what we’re discussing involves an investment beyond marketing’s typical budget. You said to expect hurdles – is budget going to be one of them?

Eric: Probably. Let’s say you’ve bought into the idea that your brand and organization must be better prepared to anticipate and respond to disruptions … okay, so whose budget is going to support this ongoing initiative? Marketing? Other groups? Corporate? Or maybe whatever your annual investment in business continuity is, maybe marketing gets X per cent of that budget.

Al: It shouldn’t be a difficult case to make, but you need to make it. The pandemic gave us all a good schooling on how well we support our customers during a disruption. That’s a good place to start with your business case.

Q: Are skill sets another hurdle?

Eric: Potentially, but the good news is that marketing doesn’t literally need all the skill sets in-house. Marketing needs to take advantage of managed services, which are designed for use by non-technical people. And it needs to get comfortable with managing third-party suppliers and other flexible resourcing options.

Al: One thing that emerged from this last disruption was that you can't assume the people and skill sets you need to do the work will be available to do it. You might have internet outages, inability to travel. It’s not enough to have one person who knows how to deploy software. You need a cross-training strategy. You can’t allow a single point of failure.

Q: What about leadership as a skill set?

Eric: Well, given that we’re talking about potentially high-pressure, mission-critical situations with lots of moving parts, there’s a need for someone with a strategic initiative, logistics coordination, scrum-of-scrums – or at least, those kinds of skills. Someone with an operational background and the authority to use it.

Q: What do you tell your talent organization you are looking for aside from those skills and characteristics?

Al: You’re not necessarily hiring a bunch of new people. You should be identifying talent that already exists in your company and making sure these individuals receive the proper training to prepare them for rapid response scenarios. 

You’re not necessarily hiring a bunch of new people. You could be identifying talent that already exists in your company and making sure they receive the proper training.

Q: Elsewhere you’ve said another potential hurdle is a company’s existing mindset. Why is that?

Eric: Because we are all well-trained creatures of habit and in normal times, for typical projects, there is a very reasonable notion that before we kick off, we need a business case with measurable KPIs. But when you’re pursuing initiatives to increase resiliency, the ROI on that is trickier. It’s more about how much could you stand to lose in various emergency scenarios.

Al: A related concept is prioritization. Or more accurately, deprioritization. Specifically, companies need to empower their people to say no to competing priorities if those imperil the success of the top strategic imperative. Knowing what’s essential and what can be put off – being able to reprioritize – that is a characteristic of a resilient organization.

Q: I feel all these hurdles ladder up to a bigger hurdle: “Do we need to do this now?” Which I am going to call the inertia hurdle.

Eric: Inertia is always the competition. Doing nothing and sticking to the way we have always operated may feel less expensive, less labor intensive. But history and experience have shown us, it’s never a good day when inertia wins.