It’s no surprise that business priorities have changed since March, but marketers appear distant from financial decision making, according to recent research from the Financial Times.

An update to last year’s Board-Brand Rift report from the newspaper found that three quarters of senior decision makers remain committed to investing in their brand as much as, if not more than, before the pandemic.

But where last year’s study found widespread misalignment between the marketing tactics perceived by senior leaders to be most effective at building brands and those which are proven to be drivers of those objectives, this year’s identified a divergence between the perceptions of marketers and those of non-marketers when it comes to financial planning.

“When we drill down and ask about the financial plans and marketing investment plans within their businesses, marketers are overwhelmingly more optimistic,” report author David Buttle told the recent EffWorks conference.

They are, for example, 19% more likely to agree that ‘This year’s budgets were cut significantly earlier in the year but our planning for 2021 is more positive’. They are also 42% more likely to agree with the statement that ‘The position has changed and we realise that brand strength is now a priority for investment’.

Conversely, they are 44% less likely to think that any cuts are not going to be reassessed until next year.

“What we’re seeing here is a real difference between what marketers believe the financial planning looks like and what the rest of the business believes the financial planning looks like,” said Buttle. “Given our audience over-indexes in board level executives, and particularly in the finance discipline, what this suggests to me is that there’s a divide.

“Marketers aren’t necessarily apprised of the financial decision making and those top-table decisions that are being made about investment in the business.”

It is clear, he concluded, that there is a gap that needs to be bridged between those responsible for marketing and those responsible for financial planning.

For more details, read WARC’s report: What the C-suite is planning may not be what marketers think.

Sourced from WARC