The marketing landscape is more disruptive than ever. And at the front-line of it all, sits procurement. After attending ProcureCon last week, OLIVER Head of Marketing, Hayley Elwell, discusses the changing marketing landscape, from a procurement perspective.

The world, as we know, is changing rapidly. Start-ups like Uber and airbnb are changing the landscape of traditional industries forever. Small manufacturers are growing twice as fast as larger ones* and crowdsourcing – micro-financing from individuals – is helping them do it.

Then of course there is the communications landscape. Proliferating across media channels and style, the way we communicate with each other and with brands is unrecognisable from even a few years ago. It is hard to imagine that Twitter (worth over $5 billion) and Facebook (worth over $200 billion) have been around for little over 10 years. And by 2018, on-line advertising spend will overtake TV advertising.

Customers are demanding more from companies – more choice, more honesty and direct communications with brands. Brands are becoming publishers, offering content that used to be paid for, for free. According to Krystal Higgins, Sr UX designer at Google, all this means that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.

It is in this disruptive landscape that marketers are operating. Having to react at speed, managing campaigns across an ever-increasing number of channels.  Not only this, but also having to be more digitally focused than ever before. Sitting behind the marketers at the front line is Procurement.  Making budgets go further, managing niche suppliers, trying to facilitate the business’ strategic goals within budgets that have remained static.

Key points from ProcureCon Marketing

At this year’s ProcureCon Marketing exhibition, held in London, senior procurement processionals from around Europe met for 3 days to discuss exactly that.  How to deliver an agile and strategic procurement function in the face of rapid change. Key themes of transparency, value and inclusion emerged.

Jesus Sancho Cubino of Carrefour, stressed the importance of involving Procurement through-out each stage of the planning process and not just at the end. He stressed how important it was for procurement, as well as marketing to stay abreast with changes, so that they can help deliver the changes the business needs and direct resources to projects likely to deliver the greatest returns. At Intel, Mike Connett explained how they have re-branded their procurement department as “Marketing Investment Managers”, to focus on this strategic goal.

Making marketing budgets go further

Robert Green, OLIVER Managing Partner’s presentation at ProcureCon Marketing 2015 focused on the structure of agencies – amid all this rapid change.  Have agencies adapted? OLIVER turns the traditional agency approach on its head by creating dedicated agencies for each of our clients. This allows them to be more closely aligned to the strategy and environment of the client, delivering better creative work, faster.

Green explained that the OLIVER model centers on the principles of market orientation, where businesses focus on 3 areas – sustainable client benefits, competitor differentiation and operational capability. He identified that while agencies have adapted “what” they do based on changing their specialisms and adapted to market demands through de-coupling and re-coupling their services, they haven’t changed “how” they deliver work.

Green challenged agencies to innovate by making “how” they deliver their work align to the strategy and requirements of their clients, not their own internal ways.  “To continue to succeed, clients are having to be adapt rapidly, but their agency partners aren’t changing with them. What they need are partners who are strategic but agile, with continual communication delivered at the point of need. Speed and adaptability will win.”

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Keen to find out how OLIVER can help your budget go further? Get in touch or check out how we helped reduce agency spend for some of our previous clients.

*Strategy& report found that in the U.S., small manufacturers (with revenues of less than US$1 billion) grew at twice the compound annual rate of large manufacturers (with revenues of more than $3 billion) between 2009 and 2012.