Internal politics is detrimental to brands. Sounds like a business cliché. But brands struggling with internal politics — geography, silos, command and control, accountability, responsibility and leadership — can lose sight of their real goal: developing and consistently delivering relevant, differentiated, trustworthy experiences that customers value.
Global brands are particularly vulnerable to internal political issues. This said, all brands, regardless of geography, can fall victim to infighting that stymies enduring profitable growth.
The challenge for brand leadership is to guide all brand leaders, regardless of geography, with inspiration, skill, knowledge, and intelligence. It requires reshaping brand management leadership into a trustworthy function capable of creating alignment without demanding conformity.
Brand leadership was our particular challenge when we worked within IHG, InterContinental Hotels Group, owner of a plethora of global brands such as Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, InterContinental, Kimpton, Regent, Hualuxe and more.
We asserted some critical brand leadership principles:
- Leadership is not about control. Leadership is about inspiration and influence.
- Leadership is not about commanding people. Leadership is about helping people to be better than they thought they could be.
- Leadership is not about managing what people do by bullying them into compliance. Leadership is about encouraging and convincing people to do the right thing. Leadership is about educating them and empowering them to know what is the right thing to do.
- Leadership is not about providing performance objectives and then hoping people will succeed. Leadership is about providing people with the support, skills and tools so they can succeed.
- Leadership is not about how many people report to you. It is about how many people want to follow your lead. Leaders are not leaders if they lack followers.
These leadership principles may seem like a call for total blitzkrieg reorganization. No. Creating sustainable change is not the same as shaking things up. Shaking things up is like a lightning bolt. It comes out of the blue, hits, and then it is gone.
Real change needs to be fundamental and lasting. Often, it is those small but significant changes that produce big results. Strong brands must also be built from the inside out. Organizations cannot consistently deliver a brand promise externally when people internally do not understand, believe in or know how to act on that promise.
Addressing the geographic or other internal issues that plague enterprises requires Brand Leadership Marketing, defined as follows.
Brand is the bond or contract with customers; a trustworthy, quality promise of a relevant and differentiating experience.
Leadership is inspiring, teaching, guiding, and persuading. General Dwight David Eisenhower said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he or she wants to do it.”
Marketing is seeing brands through the eyes of customers and other stakeholders. Marketing means making the brand the guiding star, providing the necessary focus for all thoughts and actions on behalf of the business.
Brand Leadership Marketing means changing the organization’s approach to marketing worldwide.
Every brand goal must be quality revenue growth. Quality revenue growth is the bottom line of a Plan to Win: more customers, more frequency, more brand loyalty, more revenues, more profit-producing revenue growth that is sustainable, increases market share, and generates revenue that is more profitable.
Making brand marketing and management an area of excellence requires clarifying the role of global teams and regional teams, generating a collaborative culture, stimulating and activating a Return On Global Learning (ROGL), creating and implementing Brand Frameworks for all brands, encouraging regional and local creativity within those Brand Frameworks and building internal pride in the brand function worldwide.
This is what we accomplished at IHG. The goal was to ease tensions between global and regional groups in a way that promoted, rather than diminished, each brand’s and the organization’s talents. It was clear to us that in a changing world, marketing must change to be effective.
We underscored these realities for managing brand-growth tensions.
Matrix Management
Matrix management is a global marketing fact of life. Accept matrix management as a multinational reality.
Sometimes, people say matrix management is a barrier that limits effectiveness. People say they cannot manage what they cannot control. People say they cannot manage what does not report to them. Matrix management is difficult. It is complex. To some, it is confusing.
For an increasing number of marketing situations, global marketing has evolved organizationally. Global organizational alignment is not easy. Global management is particularly challenging in a global matrix organization.
The matrix is not the problem. How to manage brands in a matrix management world is the challenge.
In the matrix world, when global brand managers complain that they cannot manage what they do not control, they are correct. But beware of what you desire. Responsibility and accountability mean you are answerable for decision-making.
Management And Manager
“Management” means to “take charge or take care of.” Management means “to handle, to direct, to control the actions.” A manager is a person who controls and manipulates resources and expenditures.
For local results accountability, brand management of the resources and activities that yield results must be local.
Leadership And Leader
Leadership is different from management. Leadership means “to guide or direct.” A leader inspires, influences, and motivates others. A leader educates and supports.
There is a very clear role for global brand leadership. It is leadership’s responsibility to direct, to guide, to support, to inform, to facilitate, to influence and, above all, to inspire. Leaders succeed through the actions of others whom they influence.
Global Brand Management
With few exceptions, there is no such thing as global brand management.
Brand leadership is global. Brand management is local.
Shared Responsibilities
Results are created locally. Local marketing teams are primarily accountable for results. Therefore, local marketers must also have responsibility for being regional thought leaders, not just mere implementers of the ideas of remote, central big thinkers.
Is the responsibility for results global or local?
The answer is, “Yes.”
The new imperative is shared responsibility. Today, co-creative, cooperative, collaborative, shared responsibilities must transform how brand teams work.
Living by these realities, we created The Collaborative Three-Box Model for reducing tensions, eliminating silos and building internal trust. The Collaborative Three-Box Model reflects the truth of shared responsibilities.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model
With a shared responsibilities model, the coordination, cooperation, collaboration, and collective responsibilities change the way we think and the way we work together to achieve common ambitions.
Collaboration is so much more effective than confrontation. Collaboration is also more effective than the isolation of the silo mentality: the “Let me do my thing my way” approach.
Imagine that the center developed a new brand purpose and promise but a large region is not on board. Command and control will not be successful in changing minds. Alignment cannot be ordered.
When we worked at McDonald’s, a small regional German advertising agency developed the “i’m lovin’ it” creative idea. It was agreed that this idea had great global potential. But the central creative director at the U.S. headquarters of that agency, instead of adopting and adapting an idea from the small satellite agency in his own network of agencies, quit. He was insulted that an idea from outside headquarters was selected and insulted that he would need to execute against this idea.
Great ideas do not respect organizational charts.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model is more than a process change. The Collaborative Three-Box Model is a mind-set change, a cultural change, an organizational change for mastering the matrix.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model is neither centralization nor decentralization. The Collaborative Three-Box Model is guided decentralization with leadership emanating from the center but with management of results located in the regions.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model is global harmonization: everyone may have different parts to sing but when the audience hears the output, it is symphonic.
Federalism?
In 1996, Charles Handy, the organizational behavior and management thinker, wrote eloquently about some paradoxes of business. One was the fact that organizations need to be big and small at the same time. They need the economy of scale. Organizations also need the resources to fund innovations and renovations.
Bigness, Handy said, is necessary to make an organization less dependent on a small number of people internally or externally and less dependent on outside consultancies. But organizations must also be small. Smaller entities want autonomy.
Handy suggested federalism. But in Handy’s mind, the center is not a bank just funding the regions. Nor are the regions separate entities. “Federalism responds to all these pressures, balancing power among those in the center of the organization, those in the center of expertise, and those in the center of the action, the operating businesses.”
The Collaborative Three-Box Model adapts some of this federalism approach but adds the discipline and process for day-to-day operations as well as being a model of mastering the matrix for building powerful global brands.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model’s structure is straightforward. First, create the brand vision, with approximately 80% global and 20% regional-local responsibility. Second, define the global brand Plan to Win and Brand Framework, with responsibility shared 50:50 between global and regional-local teams. Third, bring the brand to life, with approximately 80% regional-local and 20% global responsibility.
Each step has a set of discrete activities with associated decision rights. There are rules. For example, Freedom within the Framework. Regional and local teams bring the brand to life, but they do so within the brand’s framework: the non-negotiable guidelines and policies that define the brand’s common customer experience.
Trust is essential. Global leadership must trust that regional and local brand leadership will localize well. Regional-local leadership must trust that global will allow regional-local to develop and execute freely within the brand framework.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model design is, by virtue of its combined efforts, a trust-building formula.
By adhering to the fact that brand leadership is global and brand management is local, brands gain alignment and overcome negatives. In many organizations, “Who is responsible for brand performance?” is one of the most divisive issues.
Is it the center? Is it the regions? Where does accountability reside? Decision rights are the bane of global marketing.
Face this fact. Fix the fractures. Formulate for the future.
Collaboration is key.
Collaboration can be more difficult than change. Work with people and functions you have kept separate. Give up control of things you previously controlled.
At IHG, mastering alignment across geographies was a significant challenge. Not just because the center was reluctant to relinquish control over local results, but also because, once given responsibility and accountability, local teams felt trepidation.
Being responsible means being answerable. Being answerable can be either awesome or awful.
Or both.
Trust is essential. In the same way that geopolitical unraveling happens when trust in global partners and governments declines, brands face the same decline in trust when local organizations are told, “We will manage the thinking and actions centrally. Just follow along.”
Here are six necessary steps that must be implemented:
1. Organize Leadership
The shared responsibility model necessitates organizing for leadership. To “organize” means to arrange interdependent parts into a structure designed for coordinated actions so everyone is working toward the same common goal. This becomes increasingly difficult when regional, local forces come into play.
Organizing means having close, tight coordination and laser-like focus. Everyone is asked to achieve time-dependent performance targets. Organizations with central, ensiled, order-giving functions will have to give up some of their responsibilities. Regional functions that behaved as order-takers will now have to implement and accept accountability for results.
This can be accomplished. But it does take strong leadership from the top down.
2. Clarify New Roles For Global And Regional Teams
People must know what their job entails. People must know, in no uncertain terms, who does what and why.
What happened to make this job necessary? What does this mean for me? What do I need to do differently?
Lines of reporting must be clear. Decision rights must be clear. Everyone must speak the same language and use the same terminology. Clarity reduces politics because ambiguity gives politics room to grow.
3. Generate A Collaborative Brand-Focused Culture
Some organizations walk the talk and use brand language, but there is no buy-in. Brand building is not a cost: it is an investment. Acolytes, not just acceptors.
A strong brand culture makes the brand useful internally. It connects brand, purpose and culture to the decisions people make every day.
For organizations seeking to create this alignment, The Blake Project’s Brand Culture Workshop helps leadership teams identify and implement the internal changes needed to build a powerful brand from the inside out. The highly interactive workshop brings leadership teams to consensus around the strategic shift required, brand values, the internal brand story and the behaviors necessary to live the brand promise.
4. Stimulate And Activate Return On Global Learning
Lose the global information-hoarding behaviors. Information hoarding is wasteful and ineffective.
For example, at IHG, there were over 100 studies on breakfast. Local organizations did not feel the need to share information: “My country is different.”
Not only is this behavior brand-defeating and redundant, information hoarding is expensive. Information hoarding shows a disdain for the brand as a global brand.
The issue is not merely sharing information. It is creating a Return On Global Learning — turning knowledge created somewhere in the organization into value everywhere it can be useful.
5. Encourage Regional And Local Creativity
Great ideas do not care where they come from. A powerful idea isn’t tied to a place or position. A powerful idea is linked to a purpose.
Leadership means accepting ideas from any place and anyone. The lead creative at McDonald’s, at the time, could not deal with this.
Leadership also means supporting and spreading these ideas and inspiring more creative people.
6. Build Internal Pride In The Brand Functions Worldwide
Brand management is fundamentally about attracting more customers who purchase more often and become more loyal, generating more sales and increasing profitability.
Brand management is not message management.
Brand management is about creating value for customers and for the organization. Proud employees and proud stakeholders have enormous positive effects on customer perceptions.
The winners will be the ones that build great global brands that are locally relevant. The shared responsibility, Three-Box Model provides marketing muscle so organizations can have brand strength and power to compete both effectively and efficiently.
In some corporate cultures, the global center is where the elite marketers go to live. In other corporate cultures, the regional heads are kings of their patch of the world.
“Stay out of my sandbox. I will decide what brand castles to build in my territory.”
These mindsets must be abandoned.
The Collaborative Three-Box Model is a significantly different cultural way of thinking. The Collaborative Three-Box Model fosters a culture of passionate, professional equals where global and local share responsibility for collaboratively defining the framework that will guide all thought and action on behalf of the brand.
The goal is not global control.
The goal is not local independence.
The goal is alignment strong enough to create consistency and trust, with freedom sufficient to create relevance and results.
That is how strong global brands become strong local brands.
And that is how internal alignment becomes external brand advantage.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
