DON’T WEATHER THE STORM. BE THE STORM

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: aparna.krishnan@mbww.com.