The world of B2B marketing is changing, and you don’t have to look far to find agencies struggling to keep pace with rapidly evolving client needs. Marketing teams everywhere are haunted by the demand to ‘do more with less’, while big brands increasingly turn to internal resources to meet their needs.
Luckily for any business looking to do the same, Andrea Clatworthy, Fujitsu’s head of Europe marketing transformation, has lots of advice on how to do it well.
Previously global head of ABM, Andrea now leads the way on revolutionising Fujitsu’s internal structure, building teams at headquarter level to take agency work in-house and strengthen the brand across its markets.
We spoke to her to explore how to get enterprise-level transformation right, keep regional teams happy, and avoid the dangers of shadow marketing.
How is Fujitsu changing and why?
With change comes complexity, particularly for a global business with multilayered products and services like Fujitsu. With so much to juggle, it’s trickier than ever to get the balance of providing familiar consistency and meeting new expectations right.
While many are decentralising marketing activities to keep pace with change, Fujitsu is following a hybrid approach, with a focus on strong, clear strategy from global headquarters. ‘Big central decisions are made there, [...] then the faster decisions are made at the coalface with customers,’ says Andrea. ‘That gives us the agility to do what our customers need us to do when they're asking, at the same time aligning to our strategy. So it's layers of decision making and speed.’
But despite the fast, flexible nature of this model, the main benefit to Fujitsu is the consistency it provides. After brand survey results showed that customer perception across markets was a mixed bag, they realised a more centralised approach was required to ensure that their marketing activities reflect the direction they’re taking as a business — moving away from a focus on IT infrastructure and instead becoming known for digital and sustainable transformation.
So, how does their hybrid approach achieve this?
Centralisation vs. decentralisation
Both centralisation and decentralisation have their share of challenges.
For example, if a ship is merely one degree off its target, it’ll drift during the journey. It’s easy to course correct if you spot it at the start, but otherwise it drags the ship off dramatically off course over time. It can be the same with decentralisation. When it’s not empowering your local teams and boosting agility, it’s slowly diluting your strategy.
‘If a local market is pandering to the needs of their customer, which is the right thing to do, then that might deviate ever so slightly from the core messaging of the brand in terms of the propositions they're trying to land,’ says Andrea.
‘Over time, that could morph. Then it's quite conceivable that a customer or prospect or the market in general are getting different messages from different parts of the business, and then that leads to confusion. And if confusion exists, then it's quite possible that a customer or prospect might not naturally have that supplier front of mind when they're making a selection.’
For businesses as big as Fujitsu, when strategy isn’t driven from the centre, executing it locally becomes harder, with teams left to carve their own path forward with mixed results across different markets. But that doesn’t mean centralisation is always plain sailing either.
‘Typically what happens is all the best people from the countries and regions move into a central HQ for all the right reasons, because they're great at what they do,’ says Andrea. ‘But then the country or region loses that resource. Even with the best will in the world, that group of people don't have the bandwidth to do for that country or region what they did before. So there's a real problem there.’
At that point, duplication starts happening as local teams try to replicate the resources they once had. Regional teams might be under strict instruction not to undertake their own specific marketing activities or deviate from company-wide guidance. But without the appropriate support for their unique needs, it’s inevitable that teams will covertly attempt to take matters into their own hands — and that’s where things start to get messy.
A shadow of your former output
Shadow marketing happens when someone who doesn’t have a marketing role starts covertly conducting marketing activities. Let’s say a part of the business feels it’s not getting the marketing support they need from the existing function. They decide to invest in a new team member and allocate them some budget for, for example, running a series of PPC ads or optimising local product distribution channels. Despite the fact that these are unequivocally marketing practices, they don't call it marketing by name, and the person doesn’t get a marketing job title. Because if anyone from central HQ finds out, they won’t be particularly pleased — or their shiny new shadow marketer could end up sucked into the centre with the rest of the business’s titled marketers.
On the face of it, shadow marketing doesn’t seem like the end of the world. But, working independently, shadow marketers won’t be properly aligned to brand strategy, and won’t be aware of the massive central engine’s decisions. As we’ve seen, this can throw a business off target dramatically over many small instances of failing to implement proper brand strategy. Shadow marketers are also likely to bring on agencies from outside the business’s preferred supplier list, another consequence of not being tapped into central HQ’s processes and policies.
So, in summary, it’s a big risk for the business and an even bigger risk for the local team responsible for creating the shadow marketing function — dismissal for misconduct, anyone?
WWFD: What would Fujitsu do?
Rather than requiring local teams to become generalists overnight with expensive agency support to plug the gaps, Fujitsu gets around the pitfalls above by building specialist capability into the centre itself. Rather than limiting what regional teams can do, the focus is on freeing up their time for better, bigger things.
‘It’s really easy to get bogged down with internal stuff, but essentially we’re here to do marketing. So some of what I’m looking at is how to make that internal stuff easier. That then gives people the headspace bandwidth to do the stuff they really enjoy. Happy people do great work,’ says Andrea. ‘A good example would be our marketing ops people, who have been a great central function. They've improved all of our dashboards and things like that — things that would take a lot of admin time that are now not a problem.’
From cost savings on external spend to driving consistency, maximising asset reuse to speeding up cycle times, Andrea credits the ongoing development of Fujitsu’s internal hybrid model with a wave of benefits. But ultimately, it all comes down to that demand every marketer is seeing.
‘It’s early days [...] but it will work. It has to work, because as a profession we need to do more with less all the time.’ says Andrea.
It’s simply a matter of ensuring that central strategy is bulletproof, ensuring every team is aligned with central HQ but also empowered to make more immediate customer decisions where appropriate, and baking regional needs into the central repository to prevent shadow marketing. And for everything else, there’s good old external agencies.
