Matt Headland, Stuff Executive Commercial Director, shares his thoughts on building a brand during uncertain times and the importance of staying connected to your customers.
In uncertain economic times like these, it can be tempting to hold off on key business decisions like advertising as global headlines predict a looming recession and declining consumer confidence. Rather than holding fire, brands should seize the opportunity to take a proactive approach — 2023 is a year to be visible and build your brand as your rivals retreat.
Brands need to stay connected to customers’ hearts and minds this year. Remaining visible in challenging times can ensure you stay at the front of your customers’ thoughts and further develop brand resonance.
Being focused on your brand positioning and evolving this to be more effective and aligned with the tone of the market and your customers will drive more engagement.
If other companies scale back advertising, your brand will gain a greater share of voice which will provide a unique opportunity to increase market share. A number of global studies have found that brands that maintain or increase marketing during a recession have benefited from their brave approach.
Advertising can be more effective in a downturn than in a growth economy, according to various academic studies, as a brand’s share of voice can grow. Reckitt Benckiser Group, the global giant behind everything from Dettol to Clearasil, ramped up advertising for its best-performing brands in the wake of the GFC, defying expectations to increase revenue and profit in the following months.
As conditions remain challenging, you’ll need to be sensitive to the wider economic outlook as you look to drive revenue and customer retention in 2023. However building your brand in a downturn puts you in a better position to recover when the economy invariably bounces back.
Brands that stay active tend to recover more quickly. A Kantar/BrandZ analysis of US companies following the GFC found that strong brands recovered nine times faster than the S&P 500 average.
There are also long-term consequences to going quiet or slashing advertising budgets during a recession. Remaining visible in a challenging market can reassure customers that your brand is stable and ever-present — more importantly, that they’re in trusted hands.
In the era of misinformation and easily distracted audiences, your choice of media channel also matters more than ever.
In times of uncertainty, people flock to trustworthy news sites. During the depths of New Zealand’s Covid-19 lockdowns, Stuff saw record traffic as Kiwis sought out trusted news and journalism to keep them updated and informed during the global crisis.
When people consume news content, they enter an active and alert state of mind. This carries over to advertising in the news channel. News sites deliver double the viewing time, and advert viewing is 2.5 x more likely on a news site. Ads in news are also 2.2 x better remembered by consumers.
Brands will need to reach a diverse range of people across New Zealand to maintain their connection with customers.
Stuff is proudly Kiwi-owned, fiercely independent, and committed to helping make Aotearoa a better place for all. We have journalists and commercial teams based right across the motu, working in the communities we serve.
We’re focused on building an audience across a range of different platforms. Our flagship website Stuff.co.nz has a monthly average audience of 2.16 million people, and 2.6 million people read our print products per month. In addition, there have been more than 10 million downloads of our audio content in the past five years, and Stuff events attract more than 100,000 attendees annually.
We have also extended our reach by improving representation across our platforms.
Through Stuff’s Pou Tiaki strategy, our priority is fair representation of Māori with a focus on underserved cultural communities. We will use equity and Treaty of Waitangi principles to guide our work.
Sustainability will also be at the forefront of brands’ minds this year as consumers place increasing scrutiny on the issue of global warming – particularly in light of the recent floods and as natural disasters become a more and more common occurrence.
As media owners, sustainability responsibilities also extend to us. Stuff is the leading media owner on sustainability, and the first New Zealand media organisation to become a Certified B Corporation. In addition, through ‘The Forever Project’, we are committed to raising awareness of climate change through our stories.
We’re also constantly reviewing how to supercharge our use of data and intelligence to help advertisers win. We can harness our audience insights through data to drive more effective engagement for the brands and organisations we partner with. A great example of this is NowNext, a powerful research tool developed by Stuff that utilises our unrivalled reach and scale to deeply understand how New Zealanders think. It can provide rapid insights for brands and businesses looking to capture the public’s views on any topic.
As New Zealand’s market-leading media organisation, with unrivalled reach and scale across print and digital channels, our customers can feel confident that we are the best partner with the best audience to help them achieve their business objectives.
And as we work hand-in-hand with our commercial partners, there’s never been a better time to reach a diverse range of customers with effective and visible advertising. Marketing and data insights are key to keeping you connected with your customers during these challenging times. Despite the prevailing mood, 2023 is a year of opportunity.
