Increasing Marketing Supplier Performance Through Business Strategy Alignment

Guest post by: Darren Woolley
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The Important Distinctions Between Relationship, Collaboration and Performance Benchmarking - By Darren Woolley

The default function of marketing is to build margins and drive profit for an organisation. Therefore there is an alignment of marketing to the business strategy. Instead of marketing being seen as a cost of business, this alignment of objectives and proof of ROI against those business objectives repositions marketing as a business investment rather than a cost.

In Harvard Business Review July – August 2005 an article titled “Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance” by Mankins and Steel, reported that companies only realised 60% of their strategy potential due to a failure in implementation.

There is no evidence that this same trend does not also occur in the implementation of the marketing plan and perhaps the lesson on how to close the gap in strategy and performance for business can be applied to the business of marketing.

The fundamental difference between the marketing process and business process is that implementation of business strategy is largely focused on aligning internal teams, while marketing strategy alignment will involve stakeholder groups that are both internal and external in the form of suppliers.

We have seen examples where marketing has been incredibly effective in aligning the marketing process to the marketing objectives, but the concept of aligning marketing to the business objectives requires some core changes in philosophy and behaviour.

The seven rules proposed by Mankins and Steele are:

1. Keep the objectives simple and make them concrete

2. Debate and challenge assumptions, not the forecasts

3. Use a rigorous framework and speak a common language

4. Discuss resource deployment early

5. Clearly identify priorities

6. Continually monitor performance

7. Reward and develop executional abilities

A key consideration in achieving business strategy alignment for marketing strategy development and implementation, is having all of the stakeholder groups and suppliers aligned and measured against the same set of simple, concrete metrics (1, 6).

Develop a common language and framework for the development and implementation across all stakeholders and suppliers (3)

Ensure that the resources available are sufficient for the task and that they are applied against the high priority tasks (4, 5)

And possibly the greatest shift is to move the compensation model from a cost and resource based model to one that recognises and rewards the delivery of the common objectives. (7)

By aligning all of the stakeholder groups, including the external suppliers such as agencies to be rewarded for the agreed business objectives you achieve a total business strategy alignment and improved performance through the realisation of that strategy in marketing.

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The Important Distinctions Between Relationship, Collaboration and Performance Benchmarking - By Darren Woolley

About the Author: Darren Woolley

RSS for Darren's articles - Visit Darren's website
Darren Woolley started his working life as a scientist at the Royal Children's Hospital Neuropathology Laboratory in Melbourne, Australia, undertaking research in myopathies, neuropathies, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and Repetitive Strain Injury. He established a chemical recycling company called Resolve before making the transition to advertising in the mid eighties.
During his 15 years as a writer and Creative Director, Darren developed brand and business communication strategies for a broad range of organisations. He was Creative Director at J Walter Thompson and President of the Melbourne Art Directors' Club for two consecutive terms.
In 2000, Darren founded TrinityP3, Asia Pacific's leading strategic marketing consulting company with an international network of more than 30 industry professionals helping people to achieve commercial purpose through creative process. What that means is he leverages his extensive knowledge of the marketing and advertising industry, to help advertisers achieve maximum value from their budget by providing cost benchmarks, industry best practice knowledge, training and independent third party advice on agency selection and remuneration, media planning and buying, digital, direct and interactive marketing, TV and print production and public relations.
Now a decade on, TrinityP3 is at the leading edge of decision making in the marketing and advertising industry that spent over $200 billion in 2009 and their client base includes more than 50 of the world's top 100 advertisers, with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, London and Wellington.
With his background as both scientist and Creative Director, Darren brings a unique sense of process combined with creative purpose to his work. He has regularly been named in Australia's AdNews Power 50: The Most Powerful People in Advertising since 2005 and is a regular industry commentator contributing to numerous trade magazines.
Click here to visit Darren's website.

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