In our recent sprint survey of 75 marketing and communications specialists at the UK’s leading professional services firms, we sought to understand how this community is coping, what they are doing now, and how they are planning for the future.
The Covid-19 pandemic is testing UK professional services firms like never before. Partners, clients and colleagues are looking to marketing and communications leaders to guide their organisations’ communications confidently and effectively through these coming weeks and months. On top of this, we’ve not lived through anything like this before. So, without the real-world experience and a sense of shared best practice, how should marketing and communications leaders plan their response? This is what our survey set out to discover.
New challenges
Covid-19 has radically altered priorities and created immense new challenges.
Roughly two-thirds of the senior marketers we spoke to are consumed with crisis comms and a similar number are struggling with budget freezes and home working.
Their thoughts vary about how long their budget freezes will last (45 percent said up to three months and 55 percent said three to six months), but most (62 percent) agree that when the gates do open again, they will be underprepared.
Some good news
This paints a gloomy picture, but our research also provides some good news, or at least the first signs of it.
Marketers do not expect the freeze to last more than six months and are 39 percent are currently working with their boards on strategy.
Clearly, companies that have a signed-off plan tailored to the current situation, even if they have to change it in the months to come, will be better placed than those struggling to do this.
We hope that the findings of this research, and the checklist for action at the end of this report, help to make you ‘ready to rumble’.
We also realise that events are changing quickly, and that this research has a limited shelf life. We will do our best to revisit the data as we collectively plan a route out of this crisis. We also welcome any feedback as to how we can make this more useful for you.
Download the survey findings Lockdown and beyond sprint survey.
