Those who live and breathe marketing have a problem: we can never fully unplug. Marketing follows us wherever we go. The TV ads, the social media forums, the direct e-mail – there’s a constant wondering of the strategic idea behind a campaign, whether the target audience was properly selected, and whether the channel mix works. Or perhaps this is just me and I’m projecting. Let’s move on.
Following my last post on globalization and its ramifications for the structure of global marketing functions, I spent a week trying to unplug in Italy (thank you, Starwood points). What spurred the above introduction was the amazing difference in marketing communications techniques required in the Italian market versus the United States – both industrialized Western countries with heavy penetration of traditional and digital media. Similar on paper, far different in practice.
Two examples to illustrate the point: the U.S. has more television channels than anyone can possibly absorb; Italy is lucky to top out at 20, with RAI and Mediaset accounting for most viewership. Micro-targeting by consumer preferences, geography, and niche TV channel, while so prevalent in the US, could hardly exist in any meaningful fashion for Italian campaigns. Or take outdoor advertising – billboards, posters, street signs. You can’t turn a corner in Rome without seeing an ad plastered on exterior building walls; street names adorn the top of 2×3 foot signs displaying the latest Versace gown. Put those same posters in downtown Chicago or Washington D.C. and you’d be handed fines for littering or defacing private property. In both examples, touchpoints deemed critical for one media consumption culture have little to no value in another.
Are our marketing departments structured to take advantage of these diverse media environments? As consultant-speak as it sounds, glocalization must become a capability of global marketing functions if those organizations want to achieve some semblance of communications resonance in diverse markets. There are multitudes of trade-offs for marketing executives to consider here – which capabilities to keep tethered to a global center, how to overlay behavioral segmentation with media consumption, how local the ownership/creation of communications must become. All the while, executives must keep brand consistency and customer experience foremost in their minds. The power of today’s technology means that a misstep in Italy can mean headaches in the United States; local can become global instantaneously.
MLC members, browse our collection of marketing communications organizational profiles to see how your peers are tackling the organizational challenges behind communications resonance, and also see how Ford has overcome the challenge of selecting the right channels for each market through strong test-and-control experiments.
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For those of us in the B2B marketing world, understanding what drives sales rep effectiveness can help define the role we play in supporting our sales team. In a recent quantitative effort by the Sales Executive Council (SEC), rep characteristics—having to do with Attitudes, Skills/Behaviors, Activities and Knowledge—were studied. They found that certain attributes tended to clump together into a few profiles. More specifically, five distinct groups of sales reps were found, each containing a very different combination of attributes. See if you can guess the clear winner and the clear loser as I summarize them here: 