Stop calling it ‘more with less’ – it’s just less

Let’s be honest ‘doing more with less’ is just a polite way of saying “Good luck, you’re having your budget cut.” An old boss once described it to me as the corporate equivalent of being handed a box of crayons and asked to paint the Sistine Chapel.

Marketing isn’t discretionary spend to be trimmed when the P&L gets twitchy. It’s a lever for growth. A proper one. And the only way to protect it – and frankly ourselves – is to stop hiding behind vague narratives, and start showing proof and winning minds as well as hearts.

This requirement isn’t new. I’ve certainly been there many times over the years. But there are some traps to avoid falling into, as well as some better tools to serve us at those crunch moments if we deploy them correctly. Here’s what I have learned, sometimes the hard way.

Efficiency vs effectiveness

I remember the meeting. Trading was tough. We were all in the middle of a difficult reforecast. One of those when you’re having to do the business equivalent of looking down the back of the sofa for loose change. I had proudly offered up marketing money and in the months that followed finance colleagues were singing marketing’s praises in monthly P&L meetings about how we had bolstered effectiveness.

We had done nothing of the sort, of course. We had cut money from the harder to measure channels and maintained only those we could prove with certainty the short-term ROI. Whilst that quarter looked better from a P&L perspective, one quarter later we were starting to see the real impact – a softening base our competitors had already taken advantage of. What we had done is made our spend look more efficient in the near-term, but overlooked the bigger picture – the overall effectiveness in future trading periods.

‘Outthink rather than outspend’: How marketers are dealing with the challenge of more with less

Efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing. But sometimes we, or our partners around the business, use these terms interchangeably, inadvertently creating smoke and mirrors, and lack of clarity about the impact of the investment decisions we are making.

Because we all know effectiveness is a good thing. Marketing effectiveness is what makes for meaningful growth, and the envy of your peers and competitors. It makes us look good, or when used by others to describe impact, makes us sound good.

But we are only fooling ourselves if when we use the term ‘effectiveness’ what we’re really talking about is ‘efficiency’. So what’s the difference between the two, and is it just splitting hairs?

I think of efficiency as minimising the ratio of investment to profit. Tidy CPAs, neat ROAS and quick wins that look good on a dashboard.

Efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing. But sometimes we, or our partners around the business, use these terms interchangeably, inadvertently creating smoke and mirrors.

Meanwhile, effectiveness delivers profitable, sustainable business growth (increasing profit) – today and tomorrow.

As marketers, we aren’t here to be efficient, we are here to drive growth. We can be incredibly efficient and not grow a thing. Effectiveness is our growth engine, efficiency is a hygiene factor. One moves the business forward. The other keeps it ticking over.

In tough times, it’s easy to call activity that proves to be efficient “effective”. To settle for tidy numbers. To make budget cut conversations between departments easier. But let’s not pretend. We’re not here to save money. We’re here to make money.

Anyone can cut budget and improve a P&L in the second quarter. The real skill is to deliver in Q2 and set up success in the third and fourth quarters, and beyond. If what we’re doing isn’t driving genuine commercial impact, it isn’t working, no matter how ‘efficient’ the campaign looked on a slide.

So be very clear on how you and your business partners use the terminology. Don’t kid yourself – or be kidded – that you are driving effectiveness if really you’re just delivering some short-term feelgood, but storing up problems for the future.

Salami-slicing budgets

A couple of years after this, I was working on the launch of a new Freeview (remember Freeview?) channel from MTV. Increased competition from terrestrial offshoots such as E4 and ITV2 had impacted the ad revenue on the parent channel (the very reason we were launching on Freeview in the first place), so the launch budget was less than planned for.

We had already spent months finessing and crafting our creative and media launch, and the news of cuts threw us into panic. “Don’t worry!” our media agency said. “We can trim a bit here and bit there, and we can still do it all.”

But of course we couldn’t. That’s just not how it works. All we ended up doing was a campaign that was less than the sum of its parts.

Effectiveness isn’t the cherry on top of the cake, it is the cake.

What should be done in these situations is go back to the drawing board. But instead, the budget is spread so thin, no single channel gets the backing it needs. The result? Nothing gets the chance to work properly, everything is hard to measure and we probably spend more than we should in opportunity cost and production.

It’s so easy to do. Starting again means having some tough conversations and making difficult decisions about what to sacrifice and what to over-commit to. Pretending to ourselves we can deliver the same for less can feel like the path of least resistance in the moment. It’s difficult to write off work that has gone into developing a plan or creative work. It’s hard to give up entirely on things you were collectively excited about doing. It feels frightening to step entirely away from a channel that you know your competitors are using. But sometimes, that’s exactly what we need to do.

Spreading thin isn’t smart. It’s risk aversion that we can blame on budget cuts when we haven’t had the courage to lean in and make the tough calls.

Romanticising the underdog narrative

Another pitfall is to convince yourself less budget means we need to be brave. When agency side, I would receive briefs from the most conventional, staid, conservative and established brands in my inbox.

“We’ve got less money so let’s throw everything up in the air and start all over again”, was typical of some. It’s a great way to make yourself feel better by dressing adversity as opportunity.

And sure, there’s virtue in tapping into your fighting spirit when trading means you need to go into streetfighter mode. But just as ‘salami slicing’ isn’t the right thing to do when budgets are unexpectedly cut, neither is tearing up all your plans and starting completely from scratch.

Yes you have to adapt and cut your cloth accordingly. But starting over isn’t being strategically smart, it’s a knee-jerk reaction. That only leads to confusion – for consumers, stakeholders and colleagues alike.

Doing more with the same

I’m sure we’re all guilty of this at some point in our careers. A dabble in TikTok. A toe in the podcast pool. A test here, a tweak there. Whether it’s fear of being branded dinosaurs or obsession with shiny new toys, the temptation to experiment has probably never been more prevalent than now.

But if we can’t afford to invest in new channels properly, in production, measurement and required capability, we are setting ourselves up to fail.

The knock-on effect of trying to do more with less? Teams frazzled. Strategy blurred. Creative diluted.

I was once envious of the success a sister company was enjoying on Facebook. It led me to siphoning off budget from elsewhere to activate copycat activity.

It had nowhere near the same results and my bloody-mindedness (and jealousy) led me to sticking with it much longer than I should have. We just couldn’t get it to work.

Was it the channel? The creative? The lack of critical mass? The time we let it run? Honestly, we didn’t back it hard enough to know.

Guilty. Lesson learned. Back to our proven ROAS channels we went, until we had the nous to be sure it was strategically right for us to do it and the bandwidth to do it brilliantly.

Show them the money

The knock-on effect of trying to do more with less? Teams frazzled. Strategy blurred. Creative diluted. Too many plates spinning. Too many bets spread. No one’s quite sure where – or how – we’re meant to win.

In that fog, the very thing we need to do – make the commercial case for investment – gets harder to do. We become cost centres, not growth engines.

So how do we avoid ending up in another ‘just do more with less’ reforecast? Data. Not vanity metrics. Not last-click attribution. I’m talking about full-fat econometrics. Granular. Brutal. Rigorous. Then ruthless validation, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

We have to be brave enough to listen when the models say our best idea didn’t move the dial. That’s painful, but it’s how we get better.

Because effectiveness isn’t the cherry on top of the cake, it is the cake. If we can’t prove our work is working, it’ll always look like a ‘nice to have’. And when things get tight, nice-to-haves get slashed.

None of this means playing it safe. It doesn’t mean defaulting to short-term performance tactics. It means being bold and accountable. Creative and commercial. Visionary and validated.

So no, I’m not ‘doing more with less’. I’m doing better with better. And making sure the numbers don’t just prove it – they make it irrefutable.

Zoe Harris is CMO and executive director at travel business On the Beach.