CHAPTER 4 | EVERYBODY SING: “WE HATE COLLABORATION!”

A few years ago in marketing, mostly when digital was evolving to take over tasks and channels, everyone was talking about the challenge of silos. That in organizations, whether they were brand-side or agency-side, the left/right hands didn’t know what the other was doing.

Now, integration and collaboration are easy. Or, are they?

What happened is that platforms were created so that no one in an organization has the excuse that they didn’t see it, hear it, or notice it. If it’s posted on the portal, it’s on you.

So the challenges become, literally, what are the messages? What do you want stakeholders to know? And how are those messages delivered?

When the internal fan is full of excrement, it’s usually because someone didn’t know and/or went rogue. Or, when the actual customer experience didn’t match the promise of the experience.

Internal communication in marketing is just as important as external communication. The brand lives in hallways, in people.

And while dictatorships may be efficient, senior leadership has to get on the same page, sing out of the same hymnal, and row in the same direction or nothing will ever get done.

Collaboration at the top, where leadership works together building the reasons why from their specialist perspectives, is a zillion times more efficient and effective than rocks rolling downhill.

That’s why strategic planning WITH A MARKETING EMPHASIS, is better than strategic planning that does not consider marketing implications, internally and externally.

The world is just moving too fast. Silos are no longer relevant.

If strategy can’t be communicated quickly and appropriately, it can’t be executed.

Have a marketer, whose brain is wired to consider an entire landscape of action and implications, lead your strategic planning.