From what I gather, people who work in marketing for large, dispersed organizations are in 1 of 2 situations:
- You’ve centralized marketing, meaning that all of the siloed groups in your organization (each with their own unique audiences and competing priorities) need to come through you for marketing, branding, or communication. And sometimes people hate you for it.
- You’ve let groups go rogue (because of lack of resources or lack of support from leadership or intentional strategic decisions), and you have to answer for all of the frankenstein marketing materials with mashup logos and mismatched tones and different director’s pet taglines. It’s the Wild Wild West, and sometimes people hate you for it.
I’ve worked in both environments, and I’ve come to believe that option 1 is always better than option 2.
Yes, it means you’ll have to agree on priorities, think strategically about how you use your resources, and sometimes say no. It means that processes will need to be put in place for groups to engage and work with marketing. It means that not everyone will be able to have what they want, when they want it. And it means that leadership will need to support the decisions you make (this post is aimed just as much at them as it is at us lowly peasants).
But at least you can determine marketing priorities with the full organizational scope in mind. You can find places where marketing needs intersect so you can start thinking about sustainability and scalability. You can make the right decisions about best practices so you’re set up to succeed in the long term. And you can find opportunities to create internal harmony because you’ll see what everyone has going on.
Most importantly, you can control the communication to your audience (in terms of both flow and quality) so their experience with your organization is unified and consistent. Branding is all about building reputation, recognition, and eventually trust. If each of your business units is sending out their own marketing, your audience might not even understand that what they’re seeing is coming from your organization, or recognize the different groups as part of the whole. Without a consistent look, feel, and tone for your marketing, your recognition or reputation can’t grow because your audience will never know what to expect. You forfeit your ability to set expectations and then deliver on them, so you’ll never build trust.
By centralizing your marketing efforts, you can start delivering consistent messages to your audiences. As they see more from you, they’ll recognize your colors, your logo, your typefaces, your story. Hopefully they’ll remember positive experiences they’ve had with you in the past, and when they pass your product in the grocery store or the hardware store or the car store they can say “that’s just the kind of __________ I always buy.” Now you’re the category leader for that type of product. Congratulations.
That won’t happen if their experiences with your organization are all over the place, or some rogue agent in a far flung business unit has created a negative experience for them, or they see you as the organization that doesn’t have its shit together because on some days they get emails from Gary on the Product A team and Sheila on the Product B team and Scott on the Product C team, all promising superior products, plus a letter from the CEO announcing a recall because Product D actually isn’t so superior, plus coupons in 4 different junk mail piles, all using different typefaces.
An added bonus to centralized marketing is that consistent execution of a unified brand will also start to build trust with internal stakeholders. Over time (assuming you deliver on your own promise of producing high quality work in an agreed-upon timeframe), the people you work with will come to see you as a valuable resource that can help them accomplish their goals as opposed to an obstructionist.
So start fighting the fight to centralize your marketing efforts. You’ll probably take your lumps at first. People will resist change because that’s human nature and they’ll see it as limiting their freedom. But, in time, they’ll see the value of the work you’ve done.