Although the centralized “Shared Marketing Services” model typically provides diversified global organizations with a robust cost-effective platform for consistent messaging and branding, it can meet with resistance from internal stakeholders, such as business unit marketing staff, channel members, and, even, divisional general managers. Much of this resistance stems from a perceived loss of local control over budget and other resources, and, at least sometimes, an inability to perceive that a more efficient corporate Marketing juggernaut can lead both to enhanced top- and bottom-line growth as a result of increased revenues and efficiencies of scale.
When Excellence is Just Not Enough
For many companies, the journey to a Shared Marketing Services model starts with the establishment of “Centers of
Excellence” that showcase best-in-class marketing practices. However, there are distinct limits to how isolated Centers of Excellence can positively affect a corporation’s profitability. Because Centers of Excellence typically focus only on a few select initiatives and do not enjoy the optimized reporting structures that would enable them to affect—rather than merely influence—widespread change, they often cannot provide the benefits that would accrue if their marketing methodologies were more widely implemented by an organization. In other words, leading by example—the typical role of a Center of Excellence—can only take a marketing function so far. The road to success can meander if the proper organizational analysis and groundwork is not undertaken from the start.
For a global Shared Marketing Services and sourcing model to have real impact, it must be widely adopted. In the B-to-B manufacturing and service sectors, this truth has been proven time and again, perhaps most notably in functions such as Human Resources, Accounting/Finance, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. Because these areas have positioned themselves as fulfilling needs that organizations consider crucial and strategic, the existence of shared or centralized resources in these functions is seldom questioned. For example, HR has presented itself as the guardian of labor law compliance by its ownership the labor governance process and as a reducer of recruitment costs by enabling hires who, ostensibly, are a good “fit.” Accounting and Finance have driven home the message that accurate reporting by certified public accountants can lower the possibility of shareholder law suits. The Quality department maintains that, by reducing waste, it cuts materials costs and lowers the incidence of customer complaint. And, finally, the Continuous Improvement area holds that it eliminates expensive redundancy by ensuring that processes are steadily and relentlessly refined. All of these functions certainly provide the above-mentioned benefits; however, and more to the point, they make certain that the importance of such benefits and of their ability to furnish them is understood throughout the organization. In other words, they have created and communicated arguments that reinforce their essential role in the internal and external customer value stream.
It is often more difficult to achieve such organization-wide recognition of value in Marketing than it is in these functions, not least because, in B-to-B companies, marketing communications is sometimes considered to be mere window dressing; accordingly, its practioners can be regarded as nice-to-have but perhaps somewhat frivolous “pretty picture” people. This situation can prove a challenge to the adoption of Shared Marketing Services because the marketing communications function itself can come to be viewed as non-essential. This misperception is not immutable, however. Information Technology (IT) faced a comparable challenge decades back; then it was widely thought to be the province of lowly tech geeks, whose proper place was to babysit mainframes, preferably while out of sight, in a fan-cooled room in a building’s basement. However, as many different types of enterprise-wide reporting software arose and as the Internet became ubiquitous, the IT function came to be viewed as a central, mission-critical function, causing CIOs to gain a place at the executive conference table.
The ubiquity of the Internet, and by extension of digital marketing, holds comparable promise for a re-assessment of the value and criticality of marketing communications as well as of the need for centralized services. Digital 
marketing has made a company’s messaging, branding, and other public communications visible to anyone, anywhere, which has demonstrated the need for integrated and consistent marketing. In other words, everyone in an organization needs to be singing from the same hymnal if a company’s value proposition is going to seem harmonious and credible to the marketplace. In a global, diversified multinational, one of the best means of achieving this sort of harmony and credibility lies in a Shared Marketing Services Marketing model.
What Shared Marketing Services Can Deliver that Fragmented Marketing Services Cannot
A Shared Marketing Services model can provide:
-
On-target branding throughout the organization and resultant greater customer awareness
-
Messaging and value propositions that support a company’s main delivery and service promises globally
-
On-message branding across every part of the business
-
a deep well of marketing communications expertise for the entire enterprise
-
cost advantages resulting from the elimination of functional redundancies, and the receipt of favorable terms and pricing from third party agencies-of- record, based on providing them with a consolidated, increased volume of business
-
standardized marketing program development and deployment to reduce mis-steps
The Organizational Infrastructure That Must be in Place to Establish Shared Marketing Services
Perhaps the most important infrastructure elements are as follows:
-
defined and gated process steps that can be applied in any region or market segment, even in conjunction with an account marketing model
-
regionally consolidated digital marketing agencies, traditional ad agencies, social media consultancies, SEO services, and press relations agencies
Image, Alan Stark
-
enterprise-wide deployment and metrics systems, including CRM systems such as SalesForce, and lead nurturing and ranking programs such as Eloqua or SilverPop
-
clearly defined brand standards regarding graphics use, logo presentation, and standard color palettes
-
consolidated marketing budgets
-
direct lines of report to a central marketing function, with dotted lines to regional and divisional management
Paying for Shared Marketing Services through Reconciliation of Budgets
The introduction of a Shared Marketing Services function sometimes requires additional marketing budget allocations, but, just as often, it can be funded at least in part by the re-direction and re-allocation of money already earmarked for mildly marketing-oriented activities in corporate, regional, and divisional budgets. Careful
examination of such activities might reveal that the cost of some—such as annual sales meetings and dedicated customer events—should be borne in part by Sales, whereas the cost of others—such as employee communications and investor relations, which do not address the customer or the marketplace—should not be funded by the Marketing budget. In a global organization, Marketing’s reclamation of some of these dollars—or, as the case may be, Euro, Yen, RMB, or British Pound Sterling—will require careful re-examination of a multitude of regional and functional budgets and will involve the participation of Finance, Accounting, and whatever other function is currently using funds that should perhaps be re-directed toward an external Marketing effort.
Internal Partnerships and Common Agreement are Vital
As the last paragraph suggests, a Shared Marketing Services function is not an island unto itself nor can it be created in a vacuum. Alignment with internal partners and internal customers is always crucial. Among the two most important entities in either category are Business Development and Sales. Cooperation with Business Development personnel is ne
cessary because they must provide essential information regarding identified target markets and collaboration with salespeople is critical because they must believe that Shared Marketing Services programs are well designed and deliver useful results.
-
Business Development Cooperation—Working with Business Development is usually fairly straightforward; it provides the business strategy and Marketing provides the communications strategy and tactics. Business Development might also provide some suggestions regarding the best communications strategies and tactics but the final decision must lie with Marketing as they will be held accountable for it.
-
Sales Collaboration—By contrast, the success and fate of a Shared Marketing Services organization is often inextricably linked with that of Sales. Never is this truer than when a lead-driven Marketing organization has installed a ranking system whereby leads go from being Marketing leads (i.e., in need of further nurturing) to Sales-ready leads and, as such, are subject to conversion into opportunities and, ultimately, transactions. This is the “golden mean” where Marketing and Sales goals coincide. However, the final conversion of a Marketing-generated lead to a sale is highly dependent on the level of confidence that Sales has in Marketing. If Sales has low confidence in the quality of the leads provided by Marketing, it will make little effort to qualify them and, what’s more, might seek to circumvent Marketing, except for sales-support activities such as creating presentations and managing trade shows; sales conversions from such activities are difficult to track and so are often wholly ascribed to sales efforts, which, eventually, can lead to a diversion of the Marketing budget to Sales.
marketing principals and practice has been “catch as catch can”—as, unfortunately, is sometimes the case. Global marketing is too complicated an undertaking to perform competently without at least a working understanding of such sub-disciplines as database marketing, marketing analytics, e-mail and web marketing, branding, SEO (search engine optimization), and SEM (search engine Marketing), not to mention the reach and frequency requirements of effective messaging in social media, paid media, and public relations placement. So, as shared marketing services are launched, it behooves an organization to conduct an inventory of current personnel skills and compare it against a required skills list; subsequently skills-deficient individuals can either be retrained, or, that failing, moved to different and more appropriate functions
of messaging and increased operational cost efficiencies. The “One Size Fits All” approach is in contrast, a relic of the largely bygone era of mass marketing. Mass marketing seldom filled all customer needs even when, due to technical limitations, it was in vogue; it is far less likely to do so now when customers expect communications and products to be tailor-made to their needs and desires. This, though, is exactly what a Shared Marketing Services functions must do—provide consistent standards and templates that can be customized to meet the needs of customers in industries as diverse as aerospace and medical equipment manufacturing, in regions as disparate as Hamburg and Hong Kong. In short, the role of the shared services marketer is not just to follow standard templates, but to customize these templates to fit diverse organizational and marketplace demands—like a tailor who uses a standard clothing template (or, in the language of the trade, a pattern) but tailors it to exactly fit his or client. This is precisely the beauty and the promise of shared marketing services: affordable, yet adaptable solutions that do not need to be force fit or force fed to the customer. And, after all, isn’t this the very thing that every customer wants? For more information about shared marketing services, contact solutions@globalmarcomm.com. To add your own perspectives and thoughts on this topic, please comment below.