‘Kill brands, shut stores and restructure’ to come out of COVID-19 stronger says Mark Ritson
Mark Ritson has declared that brands placed in a holding pattern due to the COVID-19 crisis should take this time to streamline and reorganise their business in order to emerge “stronger, leaner, with greater market share and with a better team than they had going into it”.
“If you’re in freeze mode it’s pure strategy. Now you can kill brands, you can shut stores, you can restructure organisations, you can streamline,” Ritson said, going on to compare these businesses to a car in need of repair.
“If you know businesses like I do, even the most successful businesses have lots of old shit, old appendages that it never really got rid of because the car was moving too quick to fix the wonky fender. Suddenly the car has stopped and you have time – one of the few blessings here – to get out and fix the car before you can restart the engine.”
Ritson said that brands should take this opportunity to ‘streamline’ their organisations
Further to the point, Ritson said, during a web seminar hosted by Clemenger BBDO Sydney, that despite many organisations being unable to ‘drive’ right now, finding a way to “keep the engine ticking over” was important for a brand’s long-term health.
“Even if you’re in freeze mode, the recession will be an uplift from where we are now, and the post-recession will be a big uplift. It’s a mistake to think you can just suddenly ramp up advertising as the economy improves,” he said.
“That’s true of short term effects. But, the short effect of marketing, if you follow the good research, it’s about 30 or 40% of the benefit. The other 50, 60% is the long term value of comms.
“And I think that’s the point here. If you turn that off completely when recession hits, post-recession your brand is going to take a year to catch up versus some of the others.”
Ritson’s message was delivered to CEOs and senior marketers from across Australia in the seminar. During the session, Ritson stated brands should be focusing on strategy rather than research, to be executed in 2021 or “whenever the new normal happens”.
Ritson gave five key areas to focus on, starting with consumer targeting and revising the brand portfolio.
He explained: “First, who are we targeting? And who are we not? And that, as you probably know, wraps up in the long and the short of it because a good brand is doing mass targeting to everyone for the long and targeting particular segments for the short.
“Answering that question, and the balance between the two, for next year has to be on your list.
“Next: brand portfolio. You’ve got too many brands. This is an almighty opportunity to take time to work out which brands you want to keep, not which ones you want to kill.
“Kill them and kill them so that the consumer doesn’t even remember them being there.”
Ritson explained that brand positioning should be revised to ensure it is not “full of generic nonsense” and that codes should be revisited to keep marketing distinguishable to brands.
“This is a chance to go back and remind ourselves what are my four or five codes and am I using them enough?” Ritson said.
“I think these, for me, are the challenges that you should be thinking about while you have some time to think about them,” Ritson concluded.
Ritson’s ‘Marketing in the time of COVID and preparing for growth’ can be viewed here.
My favourite part of this article is how he compares people’s lives and livelihoods with engine parts.
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Tone deaf, this is not what our industry needs right now IMHO. And the advice I disagree with. Now is not the time to kill any brands. Now is the time to refocus and retool. Was it Myer or David Jones that Mr Ritson was on the board of? It was one of those two success stories was it not?
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It seems the Coca-Cola company didn’t listen to this.They need to lead the market…that’s what great marketers do; instead Coca-Cola has cut marketing support.
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Honestly, just so ridiculous and not at all supportive of the industry in the slightest.
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Sigh. This is very academic advice.
“If you know business like I do”
What does that mean?!
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Hey Previous Commenters, I’ll drive the Ritson bandwagon for a second. To be fair to him, he is’t saying kill brands “because Coronavirus”. If you see enough of his keynotes you’ll find that he very often talks about the need for clients to rationalise their portfolios and focus on what they do well. Too many organisations spend too much time trying to create markets that don’t exist for products people don’t want, flogging dead horses, etc. He is definitely not suggesting clients should take a hatchet to their business to save money. In fact, a lot of what he has been putting out on LinkedIn recently is about brands succeeding by maintaining spend and even increasing it during recession because this is a path to growth (i.e. SOV has a positive relationship with SOM).
Perhaps give the content a second read/view because you may have got the wrong end of the stick.
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@Jesus Christ – why is ‘now’ not a time to undertaken sensible marketing work, which includes killing off some brands?
Marketing is an output of business. Business is not personal, and business is not driven by emotional endeavours.
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Wendy, sarcasm aside all business are hurting. Virtue signaling and #movement are lazy attempts to promote brands. The all mighty dollar is king and if all business are not pay acute attention to the bottom line then those business are equally likely to fail.
Creative need to accept that the accountants and manager are in control, decisions are not personal they are based on acumen.
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I’m going to jump on the bandwagon with Teddy Bear… Ritson’s take might be hard to hear when things are so uncertain and we’re all trying to cope with the upheaval of the last few weeks, but I think it’s generally pretty sensible advice.
A few years ago I was head of marketing for a big national franchise with a CEO who was constantly pumping out sub-brand after sub-brand, each as ill-thought-out as the next, so my team were like hamsters on a wheel trying to keep up. Most days I left the office wishing I could just push a giant ‘pause’ button (obviously without the global pandemic that’s prompted this one) so we could take even just a few weeks to think about these concepts properly and get the strategy right – and yes, that would have resulted in killing off some of those brands.
Life is going to look very different on the other side of this – consumer behaviour will be different, spending patterns will be different and we’ll all be trying to sell to an exhausted, overwhelmed, broke population with smaller marketing teams and even smaller budgets. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be asking the hard questions now and starting from a solid foundation post-corona rather than jumping straight back on the hamster wheel.
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