How strategic risk management has changed over the last few years

Deloitte recently posted a report on strategic risk management and how it has changed over the last few years. Of the 300 large businesses Deloitte surveyed, 92% admitted to dramatically changing their approach to risk management in more recent times, citing technology as one of the major reasons.

Technology acts as both an enabler and a disrupter for businesses. Long gone are the days where businesses could take their time to react to a situation or changes in the market. Today, the ability to rapidly adapt to external forces will either make or break you as a business. If the global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that resilience is vital to long term success.

Early adopters of technology have done well from the pandemic. Remote working has long been on the cards for many businesses. With the ever-increasing cost of rent and having to be geographically bound when searching for new talent (which is why human capital will be one of the top strategic assets over the next three years), it makes financial and operational sense for businesses to allow remote working whilst maintaining a hub where employees can come together and collaborate as and when needed. The pandemic simply speeded things up.

For those companies who adopted an enterprise risk management strategy and created scenario planning around remote working, it was simply a case of pressing the button when lockdown began, as they already had everything in place; they may have just needed to buy the appropriate technology to roll it out.

The focus on social, mobile and bid data is the reason why you should be outsourcing your marketing to agencies like Novus, which works across many sectors. The benefit being that we see what’s affecting different industries and the threats they’re facing; we subsequently adapt their marketing around those challenges and opportunities. Having an internal marketing team may be cheaper (in some cases), but they will suffer from the silo effect—they will only ever focus on your business in your industry and will not see the additional/external opportunities that naturally occur.

This year, online training, live chat capabilities and automated marketing are more important than ever before, due to staff and potential clients no longer sticking to the normal 9-5 working environment, possibly because of personal pressures derived from home-schooling, looking after the vulnerable in their families, furlough situations, and many other socio-economic impacts. This looks obvious now, but three years ago (if not further back), we were talking to clients about these things. We knew then that certain industries would have to adapt to such a scenario.

Could you imagine how much easier the transition from offline to online would have been had the education system introduced lessons on this basis years ago? Even if this was simply a case of recording lessons so that students could watch them back whilst studying for their exams…having all that information to hand, and the fact that students would have already been used to these changes, would have made transition so much easier.

As a marketing company, it’s not only our job to promote and market our clients on a day to day basis in the most effective way possible, it’s also our responsibility to identify the opportunities and threats in their industry then use marketing as the tool to overcome them. Marketing encompasses all communication, both internally and externally. As a brand, if your business is talking about what will happen before it happens, when it does happen you will have credibility and visibility as the business leaders who have already created a solution to the problem your clients now face.

Don’t get me wrong, neither our clients nor us will ever be right 100% of the time. Even if you’re right only 10% of the time, this could be the difference that sees you enjoy a large market share. Look at Ocado—it’s considerably smaller than Tesco, yet it was once valued more highly. Why? One of the reasons was because it had a successful online delivery system that everyone needed at that moment in time. Online delivery is not a new thing and most e-commerce websites allowed for it; however, Ocado’s marketing leveraged the fact that they specialised in this. The knock-on effect was that consumers had the confidence to use their delivery option rather than walking to their local supermarket.

Marketers need to be tech-savvy and to utilise the latest technology to enable videography, animations, graphic design, web development, etc. If you’re a company that is likely to be affected by technology, either as an enabler or as a disrupter, it makes natural sense to work with us—a marketing agency with forward-thinking strategies your organisation can utilise.