As we begin 2025, strategy reached out to marketers to identify seismic changes in 2024, and to give us their New Year’s resolution for the next year. Idan Driman, VP of marketing with Pet Valu, is next up in our week-long series.
What do you think was the most seismic change of 2024? What is your New Year’s resolution to adapt to that change in 2025?
In 2024, we were operating in a constrained demand environment and as a result a lot of brands shifted their messaging to value messaging, specifically narrowed on pricing and promotions. I believe value is much broader than price and promo, and there are many more opportunities to showcase value including through experience, expertise, validation, emotions, exclusiveness, scarcity, sense of urgency, giving back and more. At Pet Valu, customer-centricity is a core principle; it is our mindset across all aspects of marketing – how we buy media, how we message, how we design. The first part of my New Year’s resolution is to ensure our team develops, in parallel to customer-centricity, a value-centric mindset. This means making make sure we communicate full value at all customer touchpoints.
The second part is to not neglect brand marketing, even and especially during this constrained demand environment. We will continue to invest in brand and ensure we focus on our long-term brand storytelling.
What’s one thing you hope the industry plans to start doing, one thing it needs to stop, and one thing you hope it changes in 2025?
Start: I hope the industry starts integrating creative teams and agencies into performance marketing. The impact of creative on performance marketing is underestimated. It’s the combination of art and science that can generate the best results. At Pet Valu, we had our creative team attend workshops at some of our key media paw-tners like TikTok, Pinterest and Google, which resulted in more tailored-to-medium creative and eventually resulted in stronger return on spend. Our performance team is involved early in the creative team process so the creative output will be aligned and optimized according to our media plan. I also recommend marketers don’t let their media agency only react to their creative agency’s finalized concept, or their creative agency to create campaign based on the existing media plan. Marketers should challenge their agencies to spearhead all campaigns as a creative-media combined effort that feeds from each other.
Stop: Brands and creative agencies need to stop overstepping other. Brands should not focus their efforts on micro-managing the creative output, and agencies should not try to move brands from their core brand essence just because it fits better with a concept they really like. To get the most from a brand-agency relationship, both teams should focus where they add the most value. Brands biggest value is to provide an enhanced brief that sets the agency up for success while serving as brand ambassadors. Agencies’ biggest value is to use their creative talent and expertise to generate the best creative concepts that are true to the brand. A similar argument can be made about the relationship between brands and media agencies.
Change: It would be weird If I didn’t mention the word AI, right? I believe marketers, brands and agencies need to change how they think about AI. They should consider AI as a means to an end, not an end in itself. This mindset will also help prioritize the endless AI-related opportunities that drop in all marketing leaders’ inboxes. It will also help marketing leaders navigate their talent through the excitement and concerns around AI. AI should not be seen as a replacement to your talent, but as an opportunity to enhance them. Our immediate accountability is to push ourselves, our teams and our agency partners to not be overwhelmed by AI, but rather to trial it and understand how it can help us achieve our goals faster and better, while being aware and mitigating the risks (ensuring that AI is used responsibly and ethically, avoiding biases and misinformation).
For more of our New Year’s resolution series, please check here.
