Corporate and BU Marketers: End division and learn to conquer

A senior corporate marketer with a Fortune 100 firm recently expressed concern to me about her department’s difficulties executing its new brand strategy throughout the organization. “We’ve created a great rallying point for employees and a compelling positioning for customers, but some of our core business units are resistant. If we don’t demonstrate clear implications for putting more product into customers’ hands sooner, they don’t see any near-term ROI benefits.”

She underscored a growing challenge impeding many corporate marketing departments’ ability to succeed: The frequent disconnect between corporate and business-unit (BU) marketers’ goals and objectives. If left unaddressed, everyone loses and both marketing agendas are sub-optimized.

Some organizations have broken through to find winwin solutions. By explaining its new brand strategy in a thorough, methodological, fact-and-figures-based manner that’s closely aligned with each business unit’s individual strategy (global wealth, investment banking, etc.), the corporate global brand management group of financial-services giant UBS has been wildly successful in gaining internal buy-in to the initiative. Being named for the first time (in the 45th spot) to BusinessWeek’s 2004 list of the most valuable global brands was confirmation.

At GE, corporate marketing’s selling of its recently launched brand strategy began in two of its business units to “test” the initiative’s implications internally and externally. Thus, before rolling it out to other BUs, corporate marketing had worked out the “kinks,” had a few BU’s as allies and supporters and knew what it would take to be meaningful within all 11 core BUs. The success of GE’s positioning around “imagination at work” and its financial performance speak for themselves.

In the process, both UBS and GE have found that corporate and BU marketers actually have very complementary roles.

Think about it. Corporate, under the CMO’s direction, is traditionally responsible for building brand and reputation, and communicating what they represent to all internal and external stakeholders. It also must guide the overall brand portfolio, and ensure marketing effectiveness and efficiencies across the organization. BU marketers are all about building and supporting customer relationships and sales initiatives. Where they come together is in their common goal of enabling the business as a whole to build better customer relationships, thus driving business performance.

So, rather than working on the marketing initiative du jour and being concerned only with “consistency of message,” corporate needs to adopt a more real-world, bottoms-up approach, recognizing the realities of its BUs. Similarly, business-unit marketers should incorporate more of a top-down view by not thinking just about their individual brands, but how those brands and messages fit within the overall corporate portfolio. Importantly, the BUs should think about their initiatives’ impact on the customer, ensuring their promises don’t conflict with those made by corporate or other BUs.

Finally, corporate should seek out synergies across the business units that result in cost savings and efficiencies, whether in cross-promotions, integrated marketing initiatives, sharing customer research and insights or from helping the BU integrate outsourced marketing-support services.

As that Fortune 500 marketer experienced firsthand, an “us vs. them” approach serves neither customers nor the business. It’s time for corporate and the BUs to recognize their differences and their common ground, and work together to achieve business success.