If 2024 was a year of recalibration, 2025 is the year of confronting complexity. For many, the challenge lies in navigating not only volatile markets but also the evolving role of marketing itself.
“Nothing feels predictable anymore. I think we've moved from a VUCA world to a TUNA world; it's turbulent, it's uncertain, it's novel – and the biggest is ambiguous,” said Rupen Desai, CMO and venture partner at Una Terra.
That sense of uncertainty resonates across industries. For Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft, the most significant shift has been in the fundamentals of the discipline itself: “Just the art and craft of marketing is changing. It's not just the advent of AI but the introduction of creators and the proliferation of media [that] has really sort of changed how you go out and reach customers and I think there's more unknown now than ever before.”
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For some, navigating uncertainty means doubling down on bold, creative campaigns. AXA’s Jérôme Amouyal, whose team earned top honors at Cannes for its “Three Words” campaign, believes strong creative instincts are key: “The key lesson I've learned is that boldness [is the] space when you are able to do the right thing and when you are creative in the way you show up on the market.”
Creativity, however, is also about finding the right cultural resonance. Emily Ketchen of Lenovo points to the power of sport as a marketing touchstone: “All of our research tells us that sports is the great unifier and so we have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to bring that into our marketing and we currently have a partnership with the F1 and a partnership with Fifa, two of the world's undoubtedly most popular and well-known sports.”
As the marketing playbook evolves, so too must the people driving it. Upskilling teams has become a strategic priority for many brands this year.
“When there is such a huge amount of change and when there are so many factors that are really challenging [the] usual way of doing things, go back to your own people to equip them and guide them, anchor them so that they don’t get lost in the sea of stimuli that they get, so that they don’t get distracted with many of the shiny objects that are out there,” said Taide Guajardo of Procter & Gamble.
And amid all the transformation, CMOs remain grounded in their core mandate: delivering impact.
“No matter what kind of long-term transformation you are going through, your performance will be judged based on the business performance of the next three months, so this is the learning and for the rest of the year we have two quarters ahead,” said Leyla Eskin Yilmaz of Unilever.
Thank you to AXA’s Jérôme Amouyal, Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, Mutti’s Rafael Narvaez, Una Terra’s Rupen Desai, PepsiCo’s Jane Wakely, Lenovo’s Emily Ketchen, P&G’s Taide Guajardo, Unilever’s Leyla Eskin Yilmaz and Nuria Ribe, recently of Henkel, for sharing their insights. You can hear more from them on thedrum.com in the coming days.