my turn

Commentary

Free Speech Is Common Sense In Marketing

Jeff Curry, former head of Jaguar marketing in the U.S., now consulting with organizational design and business strategy firm Undercurrent, showed me how the firm is using organizational and virtual conference chat-style apps to keep marketing teams aligned on ideas and strategy, and speaking in real time at the same virtual table. Once you see how these work, it's hard to believe email, which is obfuscating and given to eyes-only missives, is still how team members talk to each other. 

At a marketing conference this week I moderated a conversation with Curry, David Mendelsohn, managing director of AA Reps, and David Erwin, former ECD at Warner's DC Comics. 

The discussion kept going back to internal marketing function. That was the gravitational pull, even though I sat with a long list of questions more focused on the agency. As Curry pointed out, any serious look at agency relationships is moot without a strong marketing organization. It would be like designing a building from the top down. 

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As he said, if a marketing team is communicating transparently and on the same page, digital/virtual or otherwise, there's much less friction, redundancy and dysfunction, and faster throughput, and much more consensus.

None of this is rocket science. Take a look at Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto," which I think I've written about before. He describes how, in an operating room, all of the participants should introduce themselves and say what their role will be during the impending operation, and run through a checklist. And everyone should feel they’re on the same team. The book articulates the ways in which a checklist itself is a powerful inoculation against hubris, human error and miscommunication, whether in the OR, a construction site or cockpit. But it is clearly also about efficient communications and creating an environment encouraging, not discouraging, constructive criticism and new ideas. Operating room nurses have eyes, but may be disinclined to experience the contumely of a second-guessed surgeon. 

Indeed, transparency is hard in a rigidly hierarchical organization. Bad idea in marketing, especially as lower-level managers tend to be younger and are, therefore, more likely to have interesting ideas on digital and social tactics, while higher level marketers are more likely to see numbers, and less likely to see opportunities, or understand them. And today's media velocity means pressure is on to be "always on."

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