How to apply growth mindset to your marketing

Whatever the industry or size of your business, you’ll have felt the pressures of a difficult market. For marketers, this means getting the most from every penny of their budget is key. To do so, many are embracing a growth mindset.

Despite prices rising, customers limiting their spending and 61% of marketing leaders finding it difficult to show the financial impact of marketing activity, department budgets are increasing. Data from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) showed a rise of 14.7% in the money available to marketers in the last quarter of 2023.

This is because more business leaders are becoming aware of how investing in brand equity (and therefore marketing) can help drive growth. With 70% of SMEs saying this objective is a priority for them in the next year, creating a growth-focused mindset will help marketers get the most from their budgets and link their strategy to wider business outcomes.

What is growth mindset?

A growth mindset is when individuals or businesses put effort into developing the skills, strategies and processes needed to reach their goals. It’s an approach centred around the belief that improvement can be achieved by hard work.

Specifically, a growth mindset can be categorised by the fact that it:

– Constantly focuses on finding new innovations, data and insights

– Prioritises the development of new skills and capabilities

– Works to overcome and learn from challenges

– Isn’t afraid of failure or hearing feedback

This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, which is built on an attitude that systems and capabilities cannot be changed.

What are the business benefits of a growth mindset?

Every type of business, from solo entrepreneurs to corporate firms, can find advantages in establishing a growth mindset within their companies. Not just in marketing, but across all departments.

Adaptability

When a company’s strategies and processes are flexible not fixed, they can adapt to changes in their industry or customer needs. As any business leader knows, nothing about modern markets is certain, so being able to respond quickly to any challenges is key to success.

Indeed, 89% of them say that organisational resilience is an important strategic priority to help them manage disruptions and reduce the impact of crises. So by having a growth mindset, businesses can thrive in difficult environments.

New opportunities

The main feature of growth-focused businesses is that they put effort into building new ideas, developing knowledge and searching for insights. Teams are actively encouraged to try out new approaches and generate innovations.

Failure isn’t considered as a negative, but a method to learn and develop further. So, by adopting a growth mindset, businesses become more creative, innovative and technologically driven.

Satisfied employees

Across the business, individual colleagues are encouraged and given the space to learn and improve their skills. Many growth mindset businesses also have mentorship schemes to help employees develop into effective team members and leaders. This strong focus on professional development keeps employees motivated and improves their satisfaction.

Continuous improvement

Asking questions, making changes and developing new approaches is a way of working for businesses with a growth mindset. This constant effort to reach objectives means their strategies and processes continuously improve. This gives them a competitive advantage and ensures maximum profitability at all times.

Happy customers

In a growth mindset business, feedback is actively encouraged and constructively received. This includes comments from both colleagues and customers. Plus, teams are always seeking out the latest data to gain and implement new insights about consumers’ preferences.

This means their experience is being constantly improved, increasing their satisfaction and the quality of their products and services.

How does a growth marketing mindset work?

A growth mindset approach will look different in each business and between every department. However, examples of how some companies have used this approach can help marketers understand how to introduce it into their own company.

Green & Black’s

Previous Marketing Director at the organic chocolate company, Mark Palmer discussed how using a growth mindset helped the business become more innovative and open up new opportunities. After joining in 2001, he repositioned its marketing so it targeted ethically aware supermarket shoppers as well as the niche audiences in health and fine foods stores.

Once Tesco became a stockist, the team had access to a larger proportion of customer data. Using this in partnership with Dunnhumby, they discovered four new consumer groups they could attract to their brand. To make sure their marketing was effective, they ran focus groups with these audiences. At times, this involved taking on and implementing some harsh feedback.

This led them to shift their brand from ‘worthy organic’ to ‘organic cool’ and develop a strategy that emphasised their premium offering. In short, they used a growth-focused approach to pitch their brand in a different way and target new audience groups more effectively.

Microsoft

Microsoft has never been afraid to try new approaches, whether it’s in their product offering or marketing. By having a growth-focused culture across their whole business, they encourage their teams to innovate and be more creative. Whether that’s finding new customer-related insights from data or building more exciting marketing campaigns.

As Emily He, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications explained, they want their colleagues to “be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all.” This internal focus on learning and development includes mentorship and self-improvement, which helps teams stay motivated and do their best work.

Plus, with the freedom to experiment and fail without penalisation, the Microsoft marketing team can enjoy greater adaptability, collaboration and competitiveness. This has led them to have a record year in terms of revenue and be named the third most valuable global B2B brand in 2023.

Premier Foods

Whether developing new products, their communications or packaging, Premier Foods uses a process of innovation and embracing failure to reach a more effective result. This means embracing and pursuing good ideas thoroughly, but also not being afraid to drop them if the data or insight indicates that it’s not working.

Empowering colleagues to make these decisions, suggest and question new ideas is essential to this growth mindset. As Yilmaz Erceyes, Chief Marketing Officer, explains, “We try to find ways to get people speaking up when they believe in something… We debate ideas and find the best possible outcome while making sure no one shies away from sharing a point of view.”

By creating a culture of psychological safety where no one is afraid to make tough decisions, Premier Foods’ sales exceeded £1 billion for the first time in the last financial year.

How to introduce a growth mindset into your marketing

It’s not possible to have a growth-focused marketing department without following the same values across the rest of the business. That’s because this approach involves the development of an internal culture, strategy and set of processes that are driven by this philosophy.

However, it is possible to start introducing this approach into your projects and campaigns. From empowering small colleague teams to follow their initiative, not being afraid to try new creative ideas or using new data analysis methods, our experienced team can help you introduce a growth mindset to your marketing.

To find out how our team can help your business instil a growth mindset towards your marketing, call us on 01926 754038 or alternatively, drop us an email at hello@designmc.org and one of our team will be in touch.