Looking for a suitable framework - "Martketing x Teams x Entrepreneurs" N°17
Frameworks facilitate the delivery of a meaningful result: for your next marketing plans, your team, and your startups. However, there isn't one right structure, but several depending on context.
That's why "Looking for suitable frameworks" is the topic of the "Marketing x Teams x Entrepreneurs" newsletter N°17.
Be intentional with your framework to move forward.
Happy to read your comments!
#marketing #brand #team #management #startup
x Marketing
Structuring your brand through models and frameworks
Paul Bailey, Brand Strategy Director, shares his experience about making the work of the strategy team more transparent for the other groups (of designers, partner managers, etc.) and, therefore, open conversations between diverse profiles. His answer is: to make brand strategy concrete and the projects focused by using walls to show brand models and frameworks:
"Models and frameworks seem to be either loved or loathed by strategists, but the use of a good one can create much needed focus at a critical point in a project" - Paul Bailey.
However, frameworks don't have to be overrated:
"They're not intended to give you an answer. In fact, even the best use of the smartest model only ever gives you an approximation of the answer. But for me, that is fine, because in strategy there is never really an answer, there's just one of a number of answers." - Paul Bailey.
He then presents the six brand strategy models he often uses:
PESTLE model (for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental).
SWOT.
Brand Pyramid.
Evolutionary Brand Cycle.
Marketing Sales Funnel.
The Experience ecosystem.
Article published on Branding Strategy Insider.
x Teams
Behind the scene of a marketing team structure
On this podcast episode of Marketing Week, "This much I learned", the CMO of What3Words, Giles Rhys Jones, shares his journey from managing 5 to 40 employees and the marketing structure he follows:
"The brand boasts a "hybrid model" balancing key in-housed skills, such as performance marketing, with specialist agency expertise." - Charlotte Rogers.
The 16 minutes long episode also mentions the COVID challenges to strengthening the brand positioning and tone of voice, the importance of leveraging local knowledge to build a strong global brand and the benefits of hiring senior employees.
How is your product marketing team organized?
As a former Product manager focusing on marketing, I appreciate the poll of Richard King, Founder and CEO of the Product Marketing Alliance, around the question "How is your product marketing team organized?". Indeed, this is a recurring question. However, when looking at the first results, it seems that the product feature is leading the product marketing team organization. Interestingly, many product managers are not part of a team.
You can still vote in the next few days!
Are teams still the proper structure to build?
Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist at the Boston University Questrom School of Business and founder of the Institute for Life at Work, and Mark Mortensen, associate professor of Organizational Behaviour at INSEAD, bring us to the post-pandemic future of teams. Their primary recommendation is asking us to reassess when and how to use teams in organizations. It may sound strange, but there are contexts where teams work... and others when they don't.
"Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That's because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration." - J. Richard Hackman.
Challenges of hybrid work, collaboration overload, loneliness, and an imbalance between time and benefits are aspects of playing against teams.
But then, how to organize outside the team construct? By leveraging "co-acting groups":
"A less radical solution is to step down from "true teams" to the use of "co-acting groups." As we've stated in past research, true teams have a shared mindset, a compelling joint mission, defined roles, stable membership, high interdependence, and clear norms. Co-acting groups represent a loose confederation of employees who dip in and out of collaborative interactions as a project or initiative unfolds." - Constance Noonan Hadley and Mark Mortensen.
The two authors of this article published on HBR also provide concrete recommendations about recruitment, onboarding and integration protocols, and "big bang" moments.
A challenging but necessary read.
x Entrepreneurs
One startup, two CEOs (?)
Christoph Janz, partner manager at Point Nine, analyses the situation of startups having two CEOs: why it happens, when is it OK, if it is intentional, what are the disadvantages, etc. At the end of his article published on Medium in February, and to help founders, Christoph lists some questions for CEOs to ask themselves to be more intentional about their decision and therefore challenge the status quo.
If you reach these lines, it means you read my newsletter: thank you!
I hope you enjoyed it.
Happy to read your comments!
Lucie.