Wednesday, May 02, 2007
THE WAY YOU’VE DONE THE THINGS YOU DO.
PLAY THIS 30 SECOND VIDEO NOW.
John Costello is one of the top marketers in the U.S. and has made his mark at Home Deport, Sears, and Yahoo and is now President—Consumer & Retailer at Pay By Touch. The new company uses technology to use fingerprints, among other things, to identify customer shopping behaviors and preferences. Well, John certainly left his fingerprint on the recent Global Retail Marketing Association’s inaugural Summit at St. Petersburg Beach. A common thread throughout the excellent presentations at this meeting was the skyrocketing growth of technology, especially mobile media (cell phones), for retailers and service providers in today’s marketing programs.
One of the points John made, however, really resonated with me and my passion to get everyone in the organization involved with the brand strategy. He recommended that today’s successful marketing organizations should be organized by objective rather than by function as has been the norm for years. Instead of having VP’s of Advertising, Marketing, Branding, Creative, etc., the marketing organization leaders should be determined by the Who (most important customer segments), the What (differentiates the brand vs. competition), and the How (integrated marketing and advertising). To accomplish this, the former VP’s would now take on the rolls such as VP-Customer Intelligence and Insights (Who), VP-Brand and Product Marketing (What) and VP-Integrated Marketing Communications (How).
I think it’s about time that this type of thinking becomes the norm in our organizations where the brand should drive not just the marketing functions, but the entire organization. The operations need to be clued in to the brand strategy and organized so that the place where the customer gets his/her brand impression (the store) is consistent to the message. Human Resources needs to be set in finding people who will live up to the brand - whether it’s at the store or behind the scenes, IT needs to provide the technology and systems to stay up with the brand strategy and a technology savvy customer and employee base. The CEO has to become the Brand Champion who sets the pace, ensuring that the message is integrated into all decisions going forward. In short, it’s everyone’s job and it should be organized around the brand not around a chart of functions.
Until we get over the silos that currently hinder the effectiveness of today’s organizations and truly understand that the brand is the DNA that makes up the store, product or service’s reason for being, I’m afraid branding will continue to be simply a marketing function—for those who want to see their market share dwindle in the future.
For more information about the GRMA Summit, go to www.globalretailmarketing.com . Kudo’s to Sonny Nardulli and Stephanie Fischer on bringing a great forum for progressive thinkers to the retail industry.
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2 comments:
Great post. It all boils down to one thing that everyone has to remember: Your brand is your reputation. Without everyone on the same page understanding just what the company's reputation is and what it should be, no one will encompass the concept. As far as changing titles, I kind of think that titles are for suckers. Focus on your reputation and your business and throw the titles out of the window. There is only one title that matters: CUSTOMER
Ken: I love your use of the video. The conference sounded great. I wish I heard about it before hand...I might have gone.
I like Costello's reorganization idea. Best Buy did something like it. Although traditionally organized around functions, each year at budgeting, top management would choose 3-4 key strategic issues and bring in people from the various functional areas to work exclusively in the new area until it was off the ground. Example: when flat-screen TV were being anticipate, people from consumer research, marketing , finance, distribution, etc. were assigned to the new sub-business. Not exactly what Costello is saying, but iut worked like a charm to cut through the red-tape that traditionally starves such opportunities. George
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