Antonia Wade, PwC's global CMO, tells Insider how B2B spending changes in tough economic times

• Antonia Wade, chief marketing officer at PwC spoke about the ways marketers and business leaders will adapt their spending in an economic downturn.
• Before the pandemic, she said, marketers might have had a five-year plan. Now it's down to 18 months.

As the pandemic has dramatically shifted consumer and business behavior, marketers no longer have the luxury of long-term planning, according to Antonia Wade, global chief marketing officer at PwC.

"The move towards digital channels, the move towards multichannel, the move towards experience, and how your brand lives your experience, those things were happening anyway. They've just had to happen a lot faster," Wade said. "What that's meant is that marketers perhaps had a plan to do something over a five-year time period that needs to shrink down to being 18 months.

The tricky part can be balancing the forward planning with the need to be responsive to a dynamic market. "You sometimes have to make financial commitments months, sometimes a year into the future," she said. "So, it can be challenging when unprecedented or unexpected events come in because it's not always easy to just quickly pivot and reshuffle the deck."

Wade says it's advisable for marketers to keep aside a little bit of their budgets in order to react to the unexpected.

Looming worries over the global economy will impact the way B2B customers are spending money, and how many people are involved in making those decisions. "Companies try and take a reasonably risk adverse approach to buying," she said. "The way that's manifesting itself is more people are involved in the buying process...I think it's an enduring trend. We tend to see this when there's internal pressure on money and people are being more careful about the decisions they are making."