By Will Novosedlik

This week in Toronto, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a global association for marketing professionals, is launching a Framework for Positive Marketing Behaviours, designed to enable marketers to better manage risk and opportunity in a polarised world.

The goal is to help CMOs build their own policies using practical frameworks, guidelines and materials developed by WFA and global brand leaders. The framework is the result of a study entitled Bridging the Gap, which was based on responses from companies spending an estimated cumulative total of $52 billion on marketing globally.

The 70-year-old WFA has primarily focused on policy development for sectors under scrutiny, like marketing to kids or the marketing of alcohol, but this is the first framework designed to work across sectors.

“The WFA has been working to drive good practices in a variety of areas, having invested a lot of time and energy in the last 20 years to identify what ‘good’ looks like,” says Will Gilroy, director of policy and communications for the WFA. “And we thought that, with the view of trying to make all boats rise, we wanted to make those good practices available.”

Historically, marketers and policymakers have not gone out of their way to collaborate with each other unless it’s been absolutely necessary. They don’t report to the same bosses, they’re not in the same offices and sometimes not even the same location.

“Policy people say marketers are short-termist, creative, business-minded and in touch with consumers. Marketers see policy people as the compliance regulatory firefighters,” says Gilroy. “And so they’re two different DNAs at play here.”

Despite these differences in perception, Bridging the Gap finds that there’s an appetite from both marketing and policy functions for greater collaboration in key areas such as environmental sustainability, reputation and risk management, brand purpose and responsible marketing.

Nine in 10 marketers and policy professionals agree that policy is relevant to marketing (compared
to seven out of 10 in 2019) and less than 10% claim policy priorities are not relevant. That latter figure was nearly three in ten (28% for marketers and 29% for policy leaders) five years ago.

So what’s changed? “We’re operating in a much more complex world than we were five years ago. This means marketers have to deal with more and more issues,” says Gilroy, pointing to the “crisis stack” the industry now faces. There is a more challenging set of circumstances in which marketers are expected to perform.

“There’s the threat of climate change and its attending anxieties; there’s growing political instability; there’s the culture wars, which, as we have seen in recent years in cases like Bud Light, can negatively impact brand performance; there’s growing income inequality; there’s inflation; there’s the massive impact of the pandemic, the effects of which we are still feeling; and there is the increasing focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Consequently, the study identifies a much greater acknowledgement of the importance of policy research than there was in 2019, when similar research was carried out by the WFA. For example, 56% of marketers (up from 45% in 2019) said they consider policy professionals to be “critical business partners and collaborators.”

While agreeing that even more could be done to make policy priorities relevant to marketers, the two professions disagree on how to do that. Over 80% of marketers feel that policy professionals need to develop a better understanding of how marketing works and the value it delivers, while only 36% of public affairs professionals think the same.

A majority of policy professionals (68%) think that collaboration between teams would improve, with policy teams delivering punchier communications, highlighting the evolving expectations of regulators, consumers and important stakeholders when it comes to marketing, but only 24% of marketers think the same. At the same time, one in two policy professionals now think that systematic collaboration between the CMO and the global head of policy is imperative to ensure alignment on key issues.

The desire for closer co-operation doesn’t hide the fact that the two functions still have very different perceptions of each other and of their relationships. While only 18% of marketers believe policy priorities can stifle creativity and business growth, 40% of policy people believe that marketers think that to be the case.

When asked how policy people would describe marketers, the top terms were “creative” (76%), “results-driven” (64%) and “in tune with consumer sentiment” (56%). But 45% of policy leads still consider marketers to be “short-termist,” aligning with their perspectives from 2019.

Sixty-two percent of policy professionals say they collaborate with marketing teams on a regular basis, whereas only 32% of marketing respondents agree. Forty-eight percent of marketers feel they only collaborate with policy teams when the need arises and one in five say collaboration between the two teams rarely occurs.