David Burnand: Perception plays a big part in it. When we first started moving towards a global marketing structure there was a lot of resistance with people not believing it would work. But if you give people a framework and allow them to adjust for regional differences but still work with a common messaging set the reality is it can work.
Stuart Wheldon: There’s a push to centralise marketing departments, especially in tech. And a lot of US companies centralise their global role, put in technology and provide the field with the tools they need. However, the problem is that the tools are not flexible enough to meet the countries’ different needs. So, for instance, a lead in China might be different than what a lead is in the US. If you don’t take that into account when you roll out to Asia or through Europe, it can cause friction.
Julian Burrand: This is a universal challenge, it’s not just about B2B. When I was at Mars, power was very much in the regions, but there was a strategic committee that determined what a brand stood for from an essence point of view. The problems came when the leader of a particular brand would decide to make it too central. Trying to impose this solution was where it fell apart.
JH: So greater control is actually, in that respect, not a good thing?
JB: That’s right. The important thing is about defining the important elements and creating a framework, but then giving freedom within it to allow people to work in a way that makes cultural sense and reflect the different stages of development. Some brands have been around in some markets for a long time and in others for not very long, you have a different job to do. And there are different competitive situations in the market. They’re not all market leaders.
JB: No, there isn’t. You do need to start from the positioning, repositioning for the brand and sub-brands, and working out the right architecture. And what is it that you want the brand to stand for in each market? From that, you can then build your framework because you then need to understand, relative to the positioning that you think is right for the brand, how does that actually work in each market? You may think it stands for one thing but actually perception is reality and you need to understand where the differences are. But you have to allow flexibility in the framework, so the market can work on where they are and how they move to where you want them to be.
JH: How do you work out how much flexibility to give them?
DB: It’s always a challenge and personality does play a big part in it. Our US team, for example, has just done a customer reference brochure for a trade show I thought could easily have been done centrally. It is everything that reflects our values, our messages, our brand; it’s perfect. In other markets, sometimes you look at work and think, ‘that’s a bit off’ and then you have to try and coach them.
Graeme Fraser: It just happens naturally. Our founding CEO is still with us; there is very much an entrepreneurial spirit and we do try and encourage that. And we have to accept there are going to be things developed on a local basis and we just can’t control that. But, at the same time, if we have the command and control thing, we will probably fail as a marketing organisation. We get it drummed into us when we’re learning about marketing that everything must be incremental, you must learn as you go along. And we’re fairly lucky, we’re only a thousand employees globally, so we can still maintain that element of control, but we do encourage local activity.
Andrew Buckley: We have an appraisal process. We give seed money for testing and learning. They have to have gone to the effort of seeing what other people have done beforehand, then we reward that. I spend money on taking somebody from one market who’s very good and shipping them to another market for a couple of weeks as a reward. There’s a lot to be said for recognition.
JB: Internal communication is A1 critical if you are a services business because your people are often physically delivering your service product to clients. It is inextricably linked to your overall marketing campaign, they are one and the same.
Matthew Palmer: At Deloitte, internal comms is something we are starting to get to grips with. A lot of it is done really at a local, practical level rather than being mandated from the top down. What tends to happen is bits of the practice coalesce together, often initially around particular projects. From that, there springs quite an organic approach. We do a lot more stuff together, we swap information, particularly for areas that we are trying to develop. Because we’re trying to develop in that new area, there’s a lot more incentive for us to do that.
DB: We’re very, very lucky really in that we’ve got 175 years of the Siemens’ brand behind us and there’s a natural evolution. It’s strange, and not pre-programmed, but what you find is in different markets we’re known for the same things dependability, reliability, strength, global presence. As much as we want to think we’re very important, at the end of the day, the brand and the campaign and everything, it sets a marker. And for us, it’s almost as important internally slowly evolving that culture but at the point of service delivery, it’s down to an individual; an engineer, somebody in accounts payable, a sales person, etc. Culture is probably more difficult for a start-up than for a company like Siemens where the culture is almost ingrained, and it’s difficult to teach it but you know it when you see it.
GF: We can only train people so much and a lot of it comes down to recruiting the right people. We’ll only recruit people that fit. One of my key criteria is how will they get on with the rest of the team? And how will they get on with the other departments they’ll be interacting with? We’re 14 years old and we’re still developing as a company, and it’s very, very difficult to pin certain things down. And we have to be quite flexible in that respect and quite organic.
GF: Webinars are certainly a tool that’s being used a lot now, as well as eshots and newsletters. Otherwise it’s back to the good old-fashioned route of pulling key teams together; making sure you understand the communication network that exists formally and informally in your organisation.
SW: We perhaps have a bit of a luxury in this. We’re only 220 people, but at least once a year, the entire company is flown into Toronto for a review. We’ve just put in video conferencing. With conference calls, you get very unengaged very quickly. Video conferencing has stopped that instantly and it’s been a huge benefit to keeping the team in the loop. The other thing our friends in Toronto love, is we have a global call once a month and get everyone up in Toronto at 6am, so they get to see what it’s like when we have to take early morning calls. Little things like that help.
GF: At Easynet we sell video conferencing and we use it. It is an incredible piece of technology, it’s life size, it’s real time, it’s high definition. It includes desktop sharing; there’s white-boarding as well so you can actually share and collaborate information. At the moment, my big challenge is getting people to realise we have an intranet and that’s where they can find the information they need. We try to encourage that as much as possible, and we’ll get our COO to provide video updates on a quarterly basis. We’ve probably relied too much on global newsletters and if it’s not in a local language, it gets ignored.
AB: Our team also looks after internal comms. The things we do externally we try and do internally. We’ve done audits of all the newsletters to try and not repeat the messages in multiple emails, so we had them all in one and we clearly signpost what’s in each email. We communicate with the field organisations, a big investment for us, thousands of sales people globally so we’ve got to make them very effective.
MP: Something that’s becoming very apparent with our organisation concerns Generation Y and the expectation is now that what they can use at home via Facebook or LinkedIn or Bebo or Twitter, they also expect it in the workplace too. SW: We’ve been using IM for years. And it’s the lifeblood every single employee will use it on a daily basis. Because we travel so much, so as soon as you’re online, you’re on the IM.
DB: We have one lead agency and then we have a network of agencies working not under them necessarily but they take their lead. They’re brought in on the promise they will work within this framework and if they don’t, they won’t last very long. It will probably be easier to have one global network but it’s also associated with overhead and, to be honest, I want to put my money into things customers see rather than account structures.
MP: I’m seeing companies moving towards a very tight roster of agencies per region to cover most of their needs. They’ll then have maybe some smaller specialist agencies within each of those regions or countries to deal with some of it. The one place where they still seem to have a lot of agencies on the roster is actually digital. This is partly because the guys commissioning it understand the space less, so they’re looking for value-added advice from these guys. It’s also because they’re not quite sure what each of the respective partners bring so they’re almost trying things out before they make a decision. Probably in two years’ time, they’ll go through the same rationalisation cycle with digital thatthey’ve gone through with other agencies.
SW: There are also a lot of small web shops that have sprung up around the world. They were more techie guys than traditional agencies and they knew how to do a great website. They’d let the agency do more of the creative and the traditional pieces. Now the agencies are building up their digital expertise so you’re exactly right, that will evolve in the coming years.
DB: There are two things. The first is I have to feel that they know how to handle our brand. It doesn’t really matter to me where they are. I’ve got to have that feeling they understand our tonality. The second thing is the ability to collaborate, not be hugely egotistical, but to take feedback. And this comes back to the regional and the global thing, and not always assuming that the global approach is the right one but to listen to the feedback from the regions as well.
DB: There are some core competencies that you need to have locally, such as media planning. Direct marketing implementation you cannot do globally. We’ve made some attempts there, but it just doesn’t work. Events are very difficult to run. What we try and do with all these things is provide frameworks, core ideas and core programmes wrapped together with propositions, but ultimately then the implementation has to happen locally.
JB: Whether it’s a big or small agency, ultimately, it comes down to the quality of the people who work on your business and size doesn’t matter. You can be with the smaller agency and if you haven’t got the quality people on it, then that doesn’t happen. You’ve got to recognise agencies are in it to make money. As a client you want the best service possible for what you can pay and you demand maturity as well as quality from your agencies.
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