Disruptive CMO Marketing

To Centralized or Decentralized marketing? Here are the answers.

There are in principle 7 main criteria to centralize or decentralize. The basic draw of centralization or standardization is scale, cost savings, time savings, efficiencies and leverage.The benefits of decentralization are around tailoring products or approaches to local cultural insights, sales channels, local competition, local laws and languages.

Here is a framework for those 7 criteria.

  

1. Geographical centralization or decentralization

Centralization or Decentralization is often the question when companies are expanding their geographical scope and coverage. Often the company starts with a local approach as this covers the few markets best, but once more and more international markets are added certain scale advantage will start to appear. The mistake often made is lumping everything under marketing. The level of benefit will depend on what part of the marketing function we talk about and the level of scale benefits that can be achieved.

One of the elements that can be implemented early on is the area of Creating insights and best practices. This is often claimed but not really well executed. It takes time for the local teams to write up all the learnings (including the local insights and also what did not work well) and it is an interference with their day-to-day job. On the other hand, the person at central finds it often not that rewarding as their job consists of chasing local teams and collecting and structuring the learnings. Of course this can be organized via award programs, incentives, learning web-communities etc,....

Next is the area of creating Brand Consistency for multi-country brands. This area is usually well developed by setting up an international brand team that guards the brands strategy, brand design, global positioning and cross-country marketing initiatives. Local compliance needs to be achieved by giving the global team enough authority to challenge the local teams. Formal structures will usually be in place to facilitate the working relationship between the centralized brand team and the local brand teams.

Of particular interest are the Factors Affecting Advertising Standardization. The contextual, organizational and market segmentation variables affect the advertising process in various ways. The contextual variables include media availability and costs, advertising regulations, advertising agency and the number of competitors in the foreign market. Multinationals have to pay attention to local advertising regulations as some global ideas may violate the rules of a particular market. Having an advertising agency that understands the essence of globalization of advertising and the importance of local adaptation is essential. That is, the advertising agency is required to think regionally but to act locally. When dealing with different cultures it is also important to understand how local culture decodes the advertising.
In my experience, there are certain clusters of countries that have a similar cultural background that tap into the same type of humor. For example, England, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia have a shared cultural background that can be tapped in.

In general, you can go from product centric advertising to consumer insight based advertising. Many studies have found that advertising leveraging specific cultural insights provide a strong connection with the consumer and makes the consumer feel that the brand "gets me". These tend to be culture specific and are expressed in humor, choice of characters, casting, wardrobe, music selection, location, words, mannerisms, etc.... There are universal human truths and product stories that appeal to everyone. They tap into core human need states. So it is possible to create stories with global appeal but not always that easy and this will depend on the type of product that is being advertised. To achieve this, advertising concepts are often tested in multi-countries to indeed test if it resonates across different cultures.

With regards to setting the Investment Levels, it is often that the local opco has full P&L responsibility but requires central approval of the budget. It could also be that central optimizes the allocation of budgets across markets to funnel funds to the highest growth markets. For this to work smoothly roles of countries need to clearly agreed upon so that the different teams understand the cross-country allocation better.

There are significant marketing decentralisation drawbacks. Most have to do with duplication of efforts, lack of consistency, diverging goals and if no quality check from the center inconsistency in the quality of the work produced. In addition, individual markets often fail to see the bigger picture or create synergies to approaches that work in multiple markets. In very decentralized organizations it would be difficult to share best practices and to have a healthy culture of building on each others contributions.

However, some companies have gone back and forth between a centralized or decentralized marketing approach. Yahoo is one of those for example. An advantage of a decentralized approach is that marketing decisions, marketing talent and marketing budgets are brought closer to the customer — and into the regions that depend on these critical plans. It takes linguistic, cultural and legal aspects into account and leverage those that a global approach can't. In addition it links marketing strategies to revenue growth, sales objectives and overall accountability.

 

 
 

There is a happy medium where the global team collaborates with the local teams and each contributes to the right balance. Global teams can produce breakthrough advertising with talent, music rights and production values that an individual opco can not afford. Local teams can produce emotional relevant advertising that connects deep with a local culture. An integrated joint effort could be quite powerful and provide a competitive advantage.

There might be several tension points between the local and the global marketing leaders. One source of tension could be when people in Group or Head Office functions don't look at things from a truly global perspective and look at things from the country and operating environment where their headquarters is located. Another one is when the added value of the center is not very clear and local opcos feel they are the ones that actually generate revenue and a headquarter environment is seen as being an overhead.

2. Portfolio centralization or decentralization

There is another reason to centralize certain marketing functions. This is often related to ensure both individual brand and multi-brand or portfolio needs are being managed. Here is an overview.

6 marketing challenges that require courage contributions

I have seen my share of re-org across various companies and its impact on the teams. Here are 6 marketing challenges that require a special form of courage (courageous contribution). It requires you to step  forward despite these challenges and draw upon your inner strengths as well as your social network to navigate and overcome these challenges.

It involves taking action to give your best at work even when you feel as if you cannot succeed.

1. Mastering a new roles that requires new skillsets
- moving from marketing to sales

2. Working with high demands and dramatically different job expectations across groups
- everybody up to the CEO want to provide input and express an opinion on your marketing initiative

3. Shifing project scope or goals that undermine your sense of what is expected in your work
- your marketing budget got cut to fund a short term volume driving initiative

4. Going through a reorg that shift your role and responsibility
- mergers, new roles

5. Handling a difficult interpersonal relationship with a manager or a peer who puts you on the defensive
- your boss makes bad comments about you in public

6. Feeling excluded
- you notice that you are not invited for key meetings and feel left out.

7 Ways to Better People Management: How to Engage, Develop and Retain Talent

 I’ve seen the good and the bad things that companies do in relation to talent management. I have heard from my team, experienced good and bad policies, spoken about this topic with HR, my peers and managers and done the odd training. Here are seven practical things you can do to create employee engagement. They seem easy but are hard to implement consistently.

1. Manage with a personal touch
- People can only deliver their best when they are emotionally connected to the business and their leader. Be personal, know them
- Provide private and public personal recognition. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Writing "great job" and "thank you" emails go a long way.
- Take an employee to lunch once a week.

2. Understand what motivate your employees
Tell in your 1:1s that you value your team and that he or she is critical to you and you would like to understand better the motivations that drive them. Yes, they might say a salary increase or a promotion and it might be that is not possible but it gets more interesting when asking the next question: What else? They will come up with drivers that you can give. There are a number of questions you can ask. Here are a few:
- What could I do a little more of or a little less of?
- What makes for a great day?
- What can I do to make your job more satisfying?
I keep a project sheet for each team member and review regularly the motivation drivers of my team.

3. Make the ambition, vision and strategy clear and understood
- If you have a clearly formulated ambition, continue with communication where the company is heading, what this means for your department and how this translate to the subdepartments. Keep this direction simple and clear and ensure it combines the hard numbers with the projects and products that will deliver it, what it requires from the people and how it will effect cost and top line.
- I have seen dramatic swings in strategic choices and each time they cause upheaval. It is difficult for top talent to be successful if the goals and the measurement of success are constantly changing.

4. Set expectations
Be clear and direct what you expect people to do. Ensure that your managers meet regularly with their teams to update them on what has happened in the last month.

5. Seek out different opinions
Visit customers, invite people for lunch with whom you have never had lunch, go to dinner and connect with your people

6. Energize the job
Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process). Enrichment structures ways for employees to find the growth, challenge, and renewal they seek without leaving their current job. The key to enrichment is this: what enriches one employee is different from what enriches the next. Sometimes asking a few simple questions is enough to find possibilities of enrichment:
- In what ways would you like your job changed?
- What talents do you have that you don't use but would like to use more in the future?

7. Create career opportunities
- Have a clear career path in place with due dates for next moves, criterias to distinguish between high and poor performers, and be actively involved in peoples careers.
- If your best people know that you think there’s a path for them going forward, they’ll be more likely to hang around.

Here is a model or framework to think about the various factors influencing talent engagement, development & retainment.

 

Is Cultural Myopia Affecting Your Ability to be Effective Globally

In today’s world of global business, the need for culturally fluent managers has never been greater.

Fluency, which comes from employing your broad world view and knowledge of cultural differences, together with an understanding that often the skills needed in this international context are different, and even opposite, to those for a domestic role.

It is critical to enhance your ability to organise management across national boundaries, develops the special skills you require in international teamwork and leadership, and brings essential understanding of the challenges of cross-cultural management and global integration that can often seem hard to untangle.

The qualities that make a manager successful in one culture may be the very reason for failure when leading across cultures. And today, most organisations operate internationally. Even executives based in their home country find themselves mansging teams, suppliers, partners or customers in others. To add to the challenge, twenty-first century teams are increasingly likely to be multicultural.

Managing in a matrix and other international structures

One of the most difficult – and yet most common – challenges faced when working in an international organisation is how to manage within a complex structure. Typically some kind of matrix system will apply but there are many other multi-dimensional variants. When both you and your team members have at least two bosses based in different countries, even the simplest management tasks become complex.

Trends in Global Marketing

Here are some trends that I see within the companies I interact with or have contacts at.

1. Greater Movement Towards the Center: control over marketing strategy has become more centralized in the last three years. The strategic power might still rest in both global and local.

2. Global marketing budget is more based on strategic opportunities such as growth and less on revenue generated by the region.

3. Top priorities for global marketing are global best practice sharing, talent development, and consistent global strategy. 

- Branding is the marketing responsibility most apt to be placed exclusively under Central Marketing’s control, while pricing is most likely to be left to the regions.

- Public Relations and Digital/Social were the marketing services most likely to be housed at Central Marketing and shared/scaled across multiple business units or regions

20 Difficult Job Interview Questions for Marketers

These are some of the more interesting questions I have come across or which I use when interviewing to hire a marketing candidate. They are a mix of marketing technical questions as well as behavioral and hypothetical questions. Hypothetical questions evaluate how a candidate would act in a future-oriented business situation.

1. (At end of a day) Of the people you met today, who would you hire if you would start a competing service or product?

2. What would you do on your first day at the job?
- This is interesting to test what the focus is for the employee? People? Information? Tasks? on-boarding process?

3. How would you define success in the role you are interviewing for?
- Tests whether the candidate fully grasps the responsibilities for this role.

4. How would your colleagues describe your personal brand?

5. What brands do you admire personally that have truly brought something innovative to the market place?
- See if they can come up with examples you have not heard before. Anybody can say Apple or Google, but hopefully they have a broader range.

6. How do you measure ROI in media and what are your conclusions?
- test understanding of media mix modeling and breath of experience in media buying

7. How do you see media $ shift in traditional versus digital channels?

8. How would you provide social media power to your employees?

9. Who is doing sponsorships (fill in any marketing discipline ...) well and why?

10. What skills do you bring that we don't already have?

11. What are the 3 most important things to manage an account and what successes have you achieved in each?

12. How do you get the best out of your agencies? Why?

13. How does a great brief look like?

14. What do you know about our organization? and what or how well are we doing?

15. Can you provide me a recent example where you were responsible for changing the strategy for your brand that had measurable impact on the revenue line? How did you come to this change?

16. How large was the advertising budget that you were responsible for? How did you optimize the link between brand strategy to your media presence? How did this media strategy link to the strength and weaknesses of your brand? what process did you go through to develop the latest TV campaign?

17. What do you think of brand X? What have you seen of it? What would you like to change?
- So always prepare yourself. Read broker reports on the industry and the brands. They usually provide a good assessment of the challenges. I don't like it when they find everything positive. I expect a bit more critical thinking. Although if they would say, I didn't like this because so and so, but in reality that program was very successful, it would make me doubt whether they know their stuff.

18. Then I always like to ask some observational question, to see how aware the person is: What did you observe from the time you walked into this building till you entered my office? What did you like and not like?

19. I ask them about the STARs, CARs, OARs, and SOARs
- If you’re not familiar with these acronyms, STAR means "situation, tactic, action, results"; CAR means "challenge, action, results"; OAR means "opportunity, action, results"; SOAR means "situation or opportunity, action, and results". These questions gage “proof” within the context of meaningful career challenges.

20. Testing confidence: Suppose you are asked to restore the confidence of senior leaders in your (or team’s) ability, despite a recent failure. How would you go about that?