Marketing, now more than ever, has a crucial role to play in driving organisations towards their purpose and delivering sustainable revenue and profit growth.

The start of the 2020s decade has been unlike any other: the lives and livelihoods of individuals and businesses have been turned upside down by the pandemic. COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of peoples’ lives, forcing those individuals and businesses to embrace digital: new digital ways of working, buying goods and services online, consuming vast amounts of digital content and communicating by video conference with friends, family and colleagues. Within just a few months, a decade’s worth of digital and e-commerce adoption took place as the pandemic raged, leading many organisations to reconsider future operating models and the way goods and services are brought to market.

Many organisations, especially business-to-consumer ones, believe the pandemic has had a favourable impact on their brand’s perception and reputation. Shared adversity has fostered greater trust and innovation with consumers and employees alike, with the aforementioned adoption of digital channels and flexible working practices.

Life as we knew it – the “normal” – was gone. Life has been anything but normal since and a “new normal” is now emerging.

During the pandemic, many organisations scaled back marketing resource and budget, but the historic shifts brought on by the pandemic have fundamentally changed the role of marketing within organisations.

Fresh research from McKinsey[1] indicates that 78 per cent of CEOs are looking to marketing, both as a function and as a discipline, to drive growth in a post-pandemic world.

Marketing’s time is now. Marketing’s big opportunity is here. CEOs are turning to marketing to drive their company’s growth agenda.

I am passionate about marketing, a marketing evangelist, nay zealot! Some unenlightened executives, however, continue to perceive marketing as a cost, rather than an investment. This is backed up by a recent Gartner survey[2] of CMOs which showed that marketing budgets are being cut and have fallen to their lowest level as a proportion of revenue in recent history.

So how can marketing support the organisation when there is so much opportunity to grow and evolve during these changing times? The answer isn’t simple, but goes back to marketing’s core role within the organisation to understand the needs of the customer and help the organisation service this need better than the competition.

With the changing behaviours and fundamentally different ways of living and working it is more vital than ever that marketing and organisations adapt accordingly.

Through a series of forthcoming articles, Blackwood86 will explore the challenges and opportunities that the pandemic and our changing world presents to marketers and what can be done about it.