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Getting the Right Balance: More Decentralised Marketing in Europe?As marketers look to achieve more with less by leveraging corporate branding, centrally defined offers, and global communications campaigns, it is easy to forget that each country in Europe has a very different economic profile, culture, and buying style—and that each needs an appropriate ‘local’ marketing approach. Striking the right balance between global, regional, subregional, and country-based marketing activities has never been easy, and last year we saw a number of companies publicly re-evaluate their go-to-market approaches in Europe. In fact, a cyclical see-saw between centralisation and decentralisation seems to be a pattern for many companies. Today, the balance is tipping in favour of greater decentralisation, with companies such as IBM stripping away regional marketing activities in favour of a more local focus. (U.S.-owned companies such as IBM have traditionally been the most centralised; their European and Japanese peers have always had a more locally driven approach to marketing—and to business in general.) But it is not just the shift to more country-based marketing that’s interesting, it is also the activities that local marketers are being asked to execute. Traditionally, country marketers have picked up the more ‘tactical’ end of the marketing spectrum (golf/lunch/dinner, anyone?). But this is now changing. Many of the tactical activities, including market research and specialist communications activities, are being pulled into central shared service teams. At the same time, some of the more strategic activities, such as market segmentation and targeting, portfolio management, and offer development, are being driven and shaped at a local level. In some cases, country-based marketers are acting as coaches to local business managers, facilitating the strategy process in the country and, at the same time, leading matrixed teams for international programmes such as thought leadership and reference management. The shift to more local decision making is perhaps a natural consequence of what has happened in the world in recent years—and is following other emergent management thinking such as distributed leadership. But it does put a strain on local marketers; I’ve seen many of them, and they’re not happy! You see, the demand for those golf/lunch/dinner arrangements doesn’t just go away. But for most country-based marketers, that demand now represents a distraction from the really interesting work they need to do around identifying and prioritising local market opportunities and designing content-rich programmes to go after them. Some marketers have responded by outsourcing much of the tactical work (either to an internal shared service or an external agency), while others have developed internal metrics systems to evaluate whether the golf/lunch/dinner activities are worth doing at all. As local marketers struggle to balance their tactical and strategic activities, companies are stepping up to the plate by providing corporate templates, common processes, and shared systems for strategy development and marketing planning at a local level. Many companies make Web-based training available to their local marketers, and some have even established a ‘marketing academy’ that provides a framework for continuous professional development. Underpinning all of this is work with HR to define the competencies that country-based marketers now need and to build job and employee specifications to recruit and develop them. We won’t know for quite some time whether the shift to more decentralised marketing we are now seeing is just another swing of the see-saw or a more fundamental change. In the meantime, please join us for a discussion of other key marketing trends and priorities during an ITSMA Web Briefing on January 24: http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/06OB01N01.htm. —Bev Burgess, info@itsma.com |
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