Member Article

Covid crisis highlights resilience as the 'new necessary' for marketing teams

Resilience has become a necessary performance standard for marketers and their agencies as a result of coronavirus, a new report from London consultancy Aprais shows.

Senior network heads including Arthur Sadoun at Publicis Groupe and global clients including Unilever have highlighted the importance of resilience in a Covid world.

Now data mined from Aprais’ database of more than 21,000 client-agency evaluations has identified how agencies and clients alike can boost their resilience scores going forwards.

The report scanned data collected over a 20-year period and shows agencies consistently under-perform on resilience compared to other metrics. Focusing on improving resilience presents a clear opportunity to boost overall agency performance and agency-client relationships.

Kim Walker, founder and chairman of Aprais, said: ’In an ordinary business world, crises can appear daily in all shapes and sizes. The fundamental team behaviours required are the same whether the crisis is a local market supply chain event or a full-on global pandemic. ‘The Covid-19 crisis has accentuated the importance of resilience as a new team-performance standard that deserves more attention from marketing and agency leadership going forwards.’

Resilience is not limited to just company leadership but is needed across all aspects of business performance, in all functions and at all levels.

To improve resilience, agencies and clients alike need to use initiative to challenge the status quo, and manage conflict openly and constructively.

Marketers need to offer clear, swift and final processes including feedback and approvals, and provide a single point of contact to agencies.

Agencies should focus on proactively suggesting new initiatives, collaborating with other agencies and demonstrating flexibility to fit in with changing business needs.

‘It will become increasingly important to measure, monitor and develop resilience behaviours to make sure teams are prepared for future crises, big and small,’ Walker said.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Cathy Wallace .