Structure follows strategy. Marc de Swaan Arons and Frank van den Driest call the adage obvious, then find that most organizations forget or ignore it. Marketing gets split into narrower business units, then patched with bridge functions to coordinate what was split, until coordination consumes the day. The waste it creates is hidden: time lost to coordination, and email traffic that is really about turf.
When they began benchmarking global marketing organizations in late 2001 they assumed the bigger the role the better, and they were wrong. What drives motivation is clarity about a role, not the breadth of it. The organizations with the most motivated marketers have defined not only who does what but what is explicitly out of each role’s specification, and that second half is where most of them fail.
Key findings
- Across a benchmarking survey of more than 250 global brands, only 53 percent of marketers said it was clear where their personal responsibilities start and stop.
- On average only 54 percent understood how the organizational structure built around them worked, while the leading global marketing organizations scored close to 80 percent.
- Asked whether everyone in the marketing organization behaves consistently with the operating model, only 11 percent fully agreed.
- Some marketers spend as much as 80 percent of their day in meetings coordinating plans and programs with other internal groups.
- Central marketing is sorted into four roles along a what axis and a how axis: supporter, builder, driver, and champion.
Designing the organization around the strategy
Lennard Hoornik arrived at Sony Ericsson in 2008 with a brief to cut marketing headcount as fast as every other discipline and fix the brand. His first decision was to call the CEO and ask for another month before naming where the cuts would fall, so that a global marketing vision and strategy came first and the structure followed it. Assessment runs from the outside in: how well marketing connects across the company, how clear and inspiring the brand vision and its objectives are, and only then the structure itself.
Four roles are open to a central marketing group, plotted on two axes: how much of the mix is designed centrally, and how far the center drives common processes and builds capability. A supporter sits where finance, sales or R&D drives the business and marketing is largely communications. A builder acts as an internal consultant, supplying processes, tools and training so local teams can decide. A driver develops the full mix centrally for consistent billion-dollar brands, and a champion designs a global mix but leaves deliberate room for local fine-tuning. Market conditions dictate the choice, not preference.
Structuring a team for growth
At Sony Ericsson, fitness for purpose meant getting the right people in place first and moving fast: a small team of the best headquarters and regional marketers to build the vision and strategy, a marketing effectiveness pulse check to find where the opportunities and the readiness actually were, and a deliberate reconnection to the business. Hoornik asked his team to open every meeting with the current health of their products, business and key markets, which pulled the discussion away from being overly brand-skewed.
Writing down what sits outside a role is the sticking point. Jo Ryman’s warning is that companies are “terrific at adding responsibilities to people’s lists…and often terrible at stripping away responsibilities from people!” A Unilever or P&G marketer running a detergent brand in Portugal has objectively limited responsibility, closer to category marketing than to the textbook brand manager, and is among the most motivated marketers in the surveys, because expectations are explicit and the work on the last yards of distribution is openly recognized as critical.
Deciding what marketing should own
Breadth is not the prize. In a complex global organization, full responsibility for every element of the mix is no longer even an option, and the marketers doing the work already know it. The failure mode is familiar: an innovation project reaches its eleventh hour and the project leader receives an email of input from someone they had no idea was involved, or even interested. Where the authors do argue for reaching outward is the total brand experience — AppleCare, where store, online and phone care combine into one, and Zappos, where customers feel they have made a friend in customer service.
How much to centralize runs along a spectrum, from full national autonomy, through an appointed coordinator sharing best and worst practice, to an empowered global group able to veto misaligned country programs, and finally a global brand vice-president holding complete decision rights, the exception rather than the rule. Embedding is the harder half. An engagement strategy should start on the same day as the redesign, because that is when confidentiality forces silence, the best people leave, and everyone else disengages. When senior people contradict the new model, act quickly, or the credibility of the whole operating model goes.
Scope and limitations
The percentages come from the authors’ own Leading Global Brands benchmarking survey and are reported as averages across 250-plus brands, not as figures for any one company.
The 80 percent coordination figure is offered as a belief drawn anecdotally or from the authors’ own observations, and the account of service touchpoints dates from 2010.
Source
This page summarises The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2010.