Feel that? It’s the wind of change

Working in a leadership role in marketing is a tricky affair. As a communicator, your instinct is to share information. Sharing supports authenticity, deepens relationships and builds clarity around your corporate, team or individual goals.

However, while instinctive, our respective urge to share sometimes needs careful management due to commercial sensitivities, contractual obligations or the unintended impact on colleague or client behaviours. For senior marketers, this poses a challenge. We want to maintain a deep level of knowledge about our market, peer group and, crucially, our customers, but we also don’t necessarily want to “spill the tea” about every corporate challenge to our peers as part of the exchange. Us agencies are in something of a privileged position. While (good) agencies will never divulge tidbits about any individual client, senior agency leaders get a feel for times of shifting market dynamics.

For the past three months, I’ve been holding a great many conversations with other agency leaders and in-house CMOs. What’s clear is that the financial year 2023/24 was a difficult and confusing time for many marketers.

The lead up to the UK election was punctuated by a ‘technical recession’, redundancies at banks and fund firms, restricted funding at fintechs, and general caution about timing the market cycle in insurance.

This all manifested in rather uninspired activities as marketers held back on major innovations or higher risk new ventures in favour of preserving budgets and spending on tried and tested, smaller projects. But that all changed in May.

In financial services, marketers love certainty. And, as opinion started pointing towards an increasingly large outright one-party win at the UK general election, sectors started spending. With the spending, imagination has returned.

Companies are being creative, commissioning overdue initiatives and planning for longer-term strategic campaigns in a way that they simply haven’t done for more than 18 months. The challenge now will depend very much on the sector of each financial marketer.

In asset management, budgets are returning, but the number of experienced promoters is far lower than it once was. Juniors will require strategic direction and guidance to execute on big ideas.

In capital markets, an abundance of M&A activity in the banking and broking worlds has resulted in new – and sometimes fragmented – corporate cultures which will need to be rapidly harmonised if internal stakeholder engagement is to be effective.

Marketers in insurance are working from a better budget starting point than their peers in asset management but they also know that they need to plan for the next market cycle, which will mean changing from offense to defence in some instances.

Then there’s the payments promoters who have been starved of investment for a long time, but are now trying to quickly build teams of competence so they stay competitive in an environment where the pace of innovation and regulation is quickening.

These market dynamics are different depending on our respective sub-sectors but they all reinforce a need for knowledge-sharing and collaboration. While there will also be a need to be measured and commercially aware in conversations with our peers, we are on the threshold of an exciting period of creativity in financial marketing.

The extent to which we harness that depends on how quickly we resolve the puzzles ahead. The best way to do that is to tackle them together.

Joe McGrath is the founder and CEO of Rhotic Media