How to Survive as Group Marketing Director

I have been asked many times about this, most recently by an old colleague who was interested in my advice about whether he should accept a ‘promotion’ to be the new Group Marketing Director, in other words to move into the newly created role. It is tricky. It’s a fancy sounding title but a job that can cause a lot of stress, frustration and disappointment on all sides.

If there is a role for a Group Marketing Director it is normally because there are a number of other executive marketing directors across a group of companies, often, but not always, a multi-national group. So there will be divisional or local CEO’s and Marketing Directors in the mix. What, then, is the job of the Group Marketing Director? This is often very poorly defined and, perhaps as a consequence, has a very unclear degree of authority. I have filled the role twice in my career and worked with many GMD/CMO’s in large corporates during my consultancy days.

My first crack at this came in Unilever, my last position for them – no coincidence. I was the global leader for two product categories working in the centre as part of the staff team for the main board Unilever Director. This was over 20 years ago and Unilever has undergone many evolutions of management structure since then but basically my job was to develop and police a global marketing strategy. There was not much of a brief, my boss was a particularly taciturn man, so I was left to figure out exactly what this meant. Unilever was groping its way towards a global manufacturing strategy starting with Europe and in order to make this possible we had to harmonize – crunch into one shape – the various brands we had in my categories (dishwash, hard surface cleaners and fabric conditioners – very glamorous). This was not a welcome move among the local marketing directors and their bosses. One of them, boss of the French business, explained to his MD that under no circumstances was he to offer me any co-operation or assist in any way. He did this in front of me with a big smile on his face – a smile which faded somewhat when his MD, a good mate of mine, explained to him that I spoke pretty good French and had understood every word.

In fact I found this first role fairly easy. The strategy was not that complicated, the benefits of it were unarguable (several studies had shown that harmonizing the brands and moving to a European manufacturing strategy would double the profits of that division), and all the local marketing directors were my mates. I had recently been one of them, in charge of Spain. So they trusted me and we were able to make a sensible plan. The local bosses were more tricky, as I’ve said, but they all fell in line eventually when it was linked to their bonuses and/or they were replaced with people who were on message. Nevertheless I found the whole experience very boring, especially working in the, then, stultifyingly dull Unilever House. I was a brand marketer – I liked doing things not just talking about things.

My next opportunity to be a Group Marketer came when I was offered the newly created role at SABMiller Plc working for Graham Mackay in London. It carried a seat on the main executive board so there was implied authority to the title Group Marketing Director. However, the brief was still somewhat woolly and to be honest in 4 years I never did get to the bottom of it. I knew what the ‘Barons’ (the CEO’s of the regional businesses) expected, they just wanted a sexual advisor (“we’ll ask for your fucking advice when we want it”) but it conflicted with what I thought my boss and the business needed. Graham is the best CEO I have ever met and the lack of clarity was due not to any indecisiveness on his part. I was the first GMD and the business was evolving very fast on the back of some mega acquisition deals. I ended up doing 4 years in the job, one year more than I had originally agreed to, and in hindsight I wished I had stuck to the original plan. I found the last 18 months thoroughly miserable. It turns out the brief was to ensure the regional businesses raised their game in marketing in a business with predominantly local brands and a highly devolved management ethos. I was effectively the ‘burr in the saddle’ to get them to take marketing much more seriously which they did really well to their credit. My role and that of my team, which had started so well, became one of internal consultants and trainers.

I did not go into SABMiller blind. Before I took the job I consulted a few mates who had been in similar roles and listened to their advice. I even got a very valuable briefing from the great Sergio Zyman, Coke’s famous former CMO. He did the job twice and the second time around he had the sense to negotiate a very clear and powerful board mandate. His word on any aspect of marketing in any part of the world was law. His central marketing team – which he strengthened hugely – had the right to walk in to any Coke market, anytime, anywhere, and ask to see whatever they wanted. If they did not like it  – or Sergio did not like – it got changed.

Maybe that is a bit extreme, but the fact is ‘Group Marketing’ can be the end of a promising career. For it not to be, the issues that make the role so ambiguous need to be tackled.

So here is my formula for a successful Group Marketing Director. It requires getting totally clear on 4 issues:-

1.    What is the brief for Group Marketing – what constitutes success?
2.    How will this be measured?
3.    What’s in it for the local marketing teams – what are the implications?
4.    What’s the mandate – what authority do you have and how will conflict get resolved?

Start with the brief. What is the vision for marketing in the business, what is the agenda? Some vague idea about common standards of excellence and sharing best practice won’t cut it. Precisely what does the board want to achieve?
When that is sorted out you can move on to how it will be measured. What gets measured gets done and even if it can sometimes prove hard to measure precisely some aspects of marketing, there should nevertheless be some objective form of tracking the performance of Group Marketing.

Next, you need to tackle the implications for the local marketing teams. If they are expected to fall in line it must be clear what they get out of this process. If the answer is that they will find their jobs somewhat diminished to just execution then this must be confronted (as I understand it has been in Unilever). And then their bosses need to sign up for this (in my view, literally sign up) and have compliance made part of their bonus & appraisal.

Finally, what authority, in what areas, does the GMD have? If it is just implicit i.e. he reports to the boss and the boss will back him, well that’s something. But better still make it explicit – give the GMD accountability and responsibility. Don’t fudge this – it will always catch you out.

The best situation is, like Sergio, to have a really powerful mandate. The beauty is you then very rarely need to use it. Because every one knows you have the power, you can afford to be conciliatory, to listen, to understand and to be confident that you are having honest conversations. You can decide when to offer exemptions to certain aspects of ‘group marketing policy’. You can be reasonable. The worst situation is not to have a mandate and to behave as if you do. You come across as the typical ‘prick from head office’.

There’s lots more I could explain but I will leave it with these headlines. In my view I, or someone like me, should be used as a kind of coach-come-referee to both the CEO/Board and the Group Marketing Director, an objective but experienced (scarred) person who can offer the occasional voice of reason if the issues become too complex or intractable. But that is just an opinion. If the 4 issues are sorted out well upfront it should not be necessary to have a mediator. I just don’t trust that they ever are.

Finally, what is the difference between a CMO and a Group Marketing Director? In my view the former always has positional power and are responsible and accountable for the following:-
•    The health and growth of the business’ priority brands
•    Raising the marketing capabilities of the whole organization
•    Investing resource to explore new marketing tools and capabilities that will give the business competitive advantage (an example right now for many businesses would be digital marketing).

Is that what you thought a Group Marketing Director did? Then call them the CMO, it always was a better title because it positions him or her alongside the CEO and CFO, and everyone knows what they do.

So You Want to Run an Agency?

A few months back I finally got round to writing an eBook about my views on running (and selling) agencies. It’s available as a free download on this site. I make it clear at the beginning that I don’t regard this as a seminal work. It’s just my views based on my experience from running The Added Value Group and working with many other agencies and consultancies over the years.

I always made it my business to quiz people in other businesses about all aspects of building and managing an agency, to see what I could learn. And some people have been kind enough to ask me. I have gladly offered my advice with the proviso that it’s just one point of view and that, like me, they should get lots of different perspectives and cherry pick what they think will work for them. For better or worse I have now written this all down and made it available, for FREE, to anyone who is interested. It covers all the important aspects, as I see them, from managing the people, winning and keeping clients, to the more prosaic stuff like what to call the agency and how to design the offices. There’s a chunky section on financial management and how/whether/when to sell the business.

A few heads of agencies I know have now read it and have recommended it to their colleagues – there are a few nice twitters floating around about it this week. So it can’t be complete rubbish. I stress it is a personal view, an input into a debate all good agencies should continually have – only the curious win. Stame’s eBook is funnier (and more profane) but if you run an agency, or aspire to, mine is perhaps more useful.

Game Theory and the Retailers’s dilemma

As Christmas approaches a number of retailers, whether they realize it or not, will participate in a game of “Prisoner’s Dilemma”. They will have to decide whether to hold their nerve and their prices until after the main holiday season, when traditionally the ‘sales’ period starts, or whether to introduce discounts before Christmas in an effort to hit top-line targets and steal a march on competition. The decision they take has to take account of what they think their competitors will do. If every retailer holds their nerve everyone will enjoy a higher bottom line, if everyone launches their ‘sales’ early everyone loses (except the consumer) because it is a zero sum game. But if one retailer moves ahead of the others they win relative to their competitors.

This kind of strategic decision is inter-dependant – the outcome depends on the actions or inaction of others -  and is the basis of Game Theory developed in the 1940’s by Neumann and Morgenstern for economics. In 1950 Flood and Dresher developed the example of the prisoner’s dilemma to illustrate the use of Game Theory. You can read the full version of this in Wiki but the basic idea is that 2 prisoners are held in separate cells accused of a crime. If both confess they get a 5 years sentence. If neither confess they get 6 months. If one betrays the other he goes free and the other guy gets 10 years. On the assumption that less prison time is better and there is no honour among thieves it is better for both to choose to confess. If the game is repeated eventually people can figure out that it is better to ‘co-operate’ and stay silent.

In 1995 Harvard Business Review carried an article by Brandenburger and Nalebuff (crazy names, crazy guys) which tried to re-launch the use of Game Theory in business strategy since so many business decisions have outcomes that depend on the decisions of others – like the prisoners dilemma. There don’t seem to be many takers for this very mathematical branch of business science. Decisions are discussed taking into account opinions on what competitors may or may not do, but it is rare for this to involve the kind of complex matrices and algorithms advanced by the purest disciples of Game Theory.

So you can expect the ‘sales’ to start early this year as every retailer takes the pre-emptive retaliation route. The retailers and their shareholders will lose out, consumers will win and no-one will learn. When the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario was tried out among a sample of ‘ordinary people’ 40% took the ‘say nothing’ option. In other words they assumed that everyone realizes it is better to co-operate. Suckers.

Meeting Bloody Meetings

It would fair to say that all of us regard meetings as the washing up of business – you know it has to be done but no-one enjoys doing it. “What did you do at work today?” Answer: “I was in meetings all day”. This is rarely said with a smile on the lips. Every now and again you have a ‘good meeting’ which means a) you felt it accomplished something and b) it did not seem to take too long. But that is the exception rather than the rule. Well, here is a simple approach to improving most of the meetings in which you find yourself. It addresses two of the most important things that causes meetings to be ‘bad – i.e. don’t accomplish anything, take too long.

Firstly, people talking at cross purposes; secondly, poor time management. Here’s how it works.

You can divide anything you do in a meeting into 4 headings:-

1. Information download – someone has to let everybody know something about something e.g. the results of some recent test programme.
2. Information receiving – someone needs to hear back from everyone about something e.g. the results in their department of some recent initiative.
3. Problem solving – there is an issue which needs to be discussed, people need to share their views, make suggestions and in some form or another think creatively e.g. the last initiative failed, what are we going to do about it?
4. Decision making – the meeting has to decide something e.g. whether to make a particular investment.

What goes wrong is that it is never made clear under what heading an item falls. You think you are just giving an information download. I think you want a big discussion about it and offer lots of creative suggestions about what you should do next. You have a problem that you need help with. I think you are just feeding back information. The meeting rambles on aimlessly with far too much time spent on simple/low priority items and far too little spent on more complex and/or important issues.
So the first step is to indicate clearly exactly which heading an item on the agenda falls under and allocate ownership of that item to someone.

The second step is then to agree in advance what time is required for each item. Simple information giving should not take more than 10 minutes but Problem solving will take longer. By organizing the agenda clearly and allocating time realistically you can use the time in the meeting much more productively.

This is not theory – it has been proven to work. Just try it for a few meetings and see the results. It will feel like you just bought your first dishwasher and doing the dishes will never be a chore again.

New Improved marksherrington.com

It’s been a few months but I’ve been busy. Welcome to the new site designed to stimulate your business brain and occasionally tickle your funny bone. This blog will continue in much the same vein as the previous beta version. In fact I am going to repost some the better blogs from the old site (which only a few of you read) and some from the Shoulders of Giants blog (which nobody read). There will be reviews of business books (and the best 25 of all time in my opinion), featured business content from around the world and a few short polemics from me.

There is a free download section where I publish my eBooks and you can access all the best titles from Shoulders of Giants. This is all free – how generous am I? Actually the SOG stuff is very generous – this includes some of the smartest business gurus offering the best of their advice in really easy to digest formats – eArticles, eBooks and videos.

I have decided that I will continue to allow my old mate Stame Reilly to blog and publish on this site. He is too hard-up (and bone idle) to run his own site and while I do not agree with most of what he says it is often quite funny. If anybody out there does get offended a) lighten up and get a life and b) direct your comments to him not me.

So enjoy and let me know what you think