In a world where collabing is all the rage.. welcome to Glow’s whistle-stop tour of marketing’s relationships with the stakeholders that matter across the business.
First up: Marketing & Finance – the awkward couple? Many CFOs are, from a personality preference point of view, the antithesis of the commercial team; they are the cool blues to our fiery reds…. Despite a shared focus on the dollars, where we’re focused on investing to generate income, they’re paid to hold the purse strings tight, be obsessed with the forensic details and tend to speak a completely different language to us marketing folk. During my time as Eurostar’s marketing chief however, the CFO was undoubtedly one of my greatest allies. He was always ready to invest (as long as we could prove the ROI), back me up to the board with brave decisions and, most brilliantly, was always the last on the dance floor at any trade event. I do know that I was truly blessed to have worked with such a legend but as our years of record-breaking results during recessions and crises proves; when it works well it’s gold dust.
Next up: Marketing & HR – the perfect marriage? At Glow our obsession with brandculture means that the People team have to be the biggest allies of whoever owns the brand in order to bring it to life across every touch point across the business. From a matchmaking perspective, these two have much in common; both are completely focused on the retention and advocacy of their people; be it internal (employees) or external (customers) and work tirelessly to make sure they are both happy and fulfilled. As I wrote about in my blog ‘Marketing & HR; the perfect marriage’ when this partnership works well the brand will shine as bright internally as it does externally.
Then we have: Marketing & Sales – a marriage of passion? This pair is a match made in heaven; both are focused on delivery of growth, pleasing the customer and ending it all in a great big party. In most organisations, the sales team are marketing’s BFF and certainly during my time at Eurostar they moved as one. Back in the days when I was Sales Director, I used to refer to my relationship with my marketing counterpart Greg Nugent, as the typical marriage; we couldn’t live without each other, argued constantly and never had sex.
And last but by no means least: Marketing & Customer Services – these two can be a feisty pair. It’s not unusual for customer services to be run by a GM with a huge logistical operation to manage who might understandably be more process led than marketing would wish them to be. As we at Glow are forever stressing… the brand is nothing if it’s not delivered by its people so this relationship is absolutely vital to ensure delivery of the brand promise across the customer experience. So a smooth collab between these two, where marketing is absolutely central to decisions around style of service, tone of voice and even brand immersion as part of the induction process is key.
Clearly, we’re rather obsessed with the fact that everything starts with the brand, so unsurprisingly we are of the opinion that marketing is the central cog driving the success of any business. However they simply cannot deliver growth without the partnership, support, belief and engagement of their absolutely vital “collabers”.
