Our world, our behaviour and our business-as-usual have all caved in. Not a day goes by without the mention of COVID-19 and its titanic impact. Through this hurricane of change sweeping across the globe, marketers are attempting to predict the future of business and brands, all of which we know is unpredictable.
Yet marketers continue working towards their very own interpretation of the future, adding swarms and swirls to the complexity that already exists around us. With so much going on and so many moving parts in the last 2 months – missing sales numbers, no retail audits or accurate competitor analysis, blind spots on Adex and brand health impact, marketers still predict!
Looking back to look ahead
‘Don’t weather the Storm. Be the Storm’, an analytical thought piece by UM Consulting recently studied how 11 brands across 4 categories in Malaysia handled the downturn of 2008, strictly from a media and communications lens.
This one of a kind analyses studied brands that made it past the 2008 downturn with market share gains and those brands that struggled with market share gain after the downturn. Studying both kinds of brands helped formularise guiding principles on weathering a storm – principles that can be quickly implemented by brands today.
By peeling back the layers of tightened purse strings & adex fluctuations and looking deeper, we see how their actions during the downturn dictate their future. Here is a link that gives a sneak peak of the analysis.
UM Consulting: Managing unprecedented ‘change’
Through this whirlwind of changes – changes in consumer behavior, changes in business appetite, and changes in success metrics for businesses – there are a thousand pertinent questions that plague marketers today.
UM Consulting is set up with the single-minded purpose of finding answers to those questions. Questions such as:
- Should brands set up their own ecommerce capability or establish presence in third party ecommerce sites? What makes cost-benefit sense?
- Should brands continue to invest in influencer marketing when its influence is being questioned or should they find the white spaces & pain points, and take steps to make it more effective and efficient?
The question of the moment is really the question of demand
In lieu of the savage change and looming downturn – Marketers are sweating to decipher what demand will look like for their business and brand.
Enter the Consumer Demand Forecaster
With the backing of this analysis of the 2008 downturn, and legacy capabilities in marketing science, UM Consulting has built an offering called the ‘Consumer Demand Forecaster’ (CDF). The CDF estimates the ‘new normal’ of demand for a brand, and against the same, recommends how media and communications should be tailored to deliver better bang for the buck.
This is prediction pinned on science. For more information on the Consumer Demand Forecaster, contact the UM Consulting team at: [email protected].
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