How does prioritisation reflect our constraints?

Oft overlooked in marketing strategy, constraints are the yin to prioritisation’s yang. Constraints are all the limitations that prevent you from saying ‘yes’ to everything. The best performing organisations take time to understand the business value that marketing can create and align their resources from the top of that list until constraints prevent them from doing more. The worst performing organisations agree to objectives without consideration of if they can or should be delivered, potentially just to keep some outspoken stakeholders satisfied. Most marketing organisations will be somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

Constraints come in many forms and misunderstanding them can introduce inefficiency and waste into your marketing engine. Constraints, though, are actually both a necessity and positive. When they are applied correctly and complemented with the right governance framework, constraints drive resourcefulness, innovation and efficiency. Without constraints, you can spend what you want be and inefficient as you want and still deliver without penalty. Jeff Bezos, who famously tried to instil a culture within Amazon of working within constraints once said “I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” Pair that with a quote from Ronald Reagan: “There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.” What he is saying is that while there may be walls, barriers and constraints in the real world, they needn’t be stop signs for the people and teams that have to face them. Constraints force you to think around them, come up with new ideas; reuse, reinvent or repurpose that which exists rather than building from scratch; think around the problem rather than just thinking literally. Considered another way, constraints are what make challenges fun.

Budget

Marketing budgets may fall into many different investments buckets. You might talk about program budgets to spend on developing marketing outputs, travel and expenses to cover staff costs, and learning and development budgets. Every organisation has different approval criteria and processes for whether you can transfer budget between buckets, so for now we’ll just consider some of the implications of program budget decisions.

Marketing budgeting tools will typically capture different investment types to help with analytics but without understanding the actual work that’s getting done and the constraints that teams must work under inefficiencies may be hidden or mislabelled. Consider localisation – do your global teams have enough budget to localise assets for your Geo teams or are local teams having to use local agencies and budget to build more content themselves? Or are you localising assets that Geo teams are choosing not to use because they have their own budget to pay for content they want to use? Two similar results but driven from very different places. What about activation budgets for digital and offline media spend – how many campaigns do you have budget to activate concurrently? Can all regions activate the same volume or in regions with multiple languages are they forced to run a subset? How widespread and visible is this need to make decisions on reduced scope and does it feed into content development choices?

For many enterprise marketing functions the US is a core market with a single language requirement and significant opportunity for returns, so budgets are scaled accordingly. For a campaign with 20 different touchpoints and a budget of $2m the average spend per asset would be $100,000. But in Europe, there are multiple language requirements. Looking at just the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain there are five potential languages. Some markets such as Germany and the Netherlands may recommend running campaigns in both English and local language to cater to their audiences. Therefore what may appear to be a reasonable budget benchmarked simplistically against the revenue opportunity of the two markets may be limiting in Europe. The same 20 assets with a budget of $600,000 – because the marketing target is lower – when split into local languages of UK, French, German, Netherlands, Spanish, and English and running in both local language and English in those markets means 7 different campaigns. The 20 assets activated in those languages and markets would receive less than $5,000 investment behind them, and the headcount required to set the campaign up would be significantly higher. Have you evaluated if there is a minimum spend by which a campaign or piece of content can be effectively promoted before its cost-inefficient to activate? If the minimum amount to effectively promote a piece of content is $10,000 then in EMEA there is not enough budget to run all of the campaigns or content in all of the languages. You need to prioritise.

Now, consider contractors. If headcount is a limitation on a team’s ability to activate them they may invest in contractors. If contractor budget is covered within programme spend then the headcount challenge may be hidden and the effectiveness of campaigns from that programme spend my appear lower consequently. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to cover contractors this way, but lack of visibility and understanding can be an issue when targets or budgets are updated year-over-year. Contractors may be more expensive than full-time employees as well so without a plan to convert them later costs can build up unnecessarily.

Headcount

Headcount, or people, is a basic constraint that’s easy to comprehend. Consider, however, whether you have your headcount sitting in the right teams. Are your global teams overstaffed and your local teams unable to spend time with Sales? Or are you too area- or Geo-aligned and unable to drive scale efficiency from your global functions. If a global team of 20 people is able to deliver the equivalent value of three 10-person Geo teams, you potentially have 10 people in the wrong function eating into your constraints. Or are you too field marketing-focussed and you don’t have enough people driving insights and data?

Headcount has a natural tie-in to budgeting constraints. If a team is under-resourced, are they using programme budgets to contract work to an agency to increase team capacity? Headcount constraints can also be impacted by the decisions of other teams. If a global team develops something that is too complex or requires too much budget for a Geo team to activate, the Geo team must commit their headcount to re-developing it, thus reducing the benefits of the initial global development. Teams and outputs have to be rightsized to each other, and since people have unique skills simply transferring them is unlikely to be an option. Proper integrated planning of team structure with leaders sharing joint responsibility for building the right marketing mix, rather than empire building to grow the authority of their own team, is the only way to resolve this in the long term.

Responsiveness and SLAs

The logical corollary of headcount constraints is that work can take longer to deliver. While it may technically be a headcount limitation, what teams can experience is responsiveness or SLA constraint. Taking six weeks to turn around an update to a web page may not be satisfactory when a campaign demands a change within a week. Would an alternative be to go around the team and use another approach to making the update? Maybe teams start to avoid relying upon the web team and start using self-service microsite tools provided by other vendors, which introduce other problems with tracking and data integrity. Or maybe they pay an outside vendor to make updates, which introduces a budget inefficiency? Taking too long or being too difficult to work with are some of the biggest reasons that shared services marketing functions fail to deliver the benefits expected.

Leaders try to make these functions perfectly efficient from the outset, without realising that efficiency means nothing when the service is terrible. This shouldn’t really be a surprise when in our personal lives most people rarely go back to a retailer, keep working with a supplier or stay subscribed to service when the quality and service they receive is below expectations. ‘But they’re really efficient’ is not a reason you would tolerate outside of work, so why should it different in the workplace?