Collaboration - marketing's competitive advantage

Common frustrations

These are common frustrations most marketing departments face on a daily basis, yet the reality is that they need to respond quickly to new announcements, concerns and innovation windows, especially considering the industry's changing dynamics and increased pressures.

In today's business environment, organisations of all types are experiencing new demands due to key trends forcing changes in the overall business landscape. These trends occur in three main areas:

1. Organisational and globalisation economic trends: today's global economy puts new pressures on executives who need to answer to regulatory requirements, all while stakeholder performance expectations have never been higher. Furthermore, many organisations have offices, branches, or subsidiaries in far-reaching locations, making continuity between work groups more difficult.

2. Technology trends: IP network convergence and the reduced cost of bandwidth are allowing for multiple forms of communication into a common platform - driving real-time and lifelike communication. Unified communications is finally becoming a reality.

   Social trends: not only has the ‘green' movement affected the way companies work, but also people. People want to live and work where they want and the best people for a job don't necessarily live in the company's location. What's more, they expect instant communications in the workplace.

Rest on the shoulders

These pressures, and that of pushing both short-term performance and long-term brand-building initiatives, rest squarely on the shoulders of the chief marketing officer (CMO) - one of the more hot-seat executive positions in any company currently.

The CMO needs strategic initiatives to respond to such trends and remain competitive. However, creative strategies such as off-shoring, M&A, global supply chains, geographically dispersed teams, remote experts, and strategic corporate partnerships introduce a distance barrier to the organisation, which can ultimately inhibit performance and productivity.

Enter the importance of collaboration solutions for marketers - getting teams to work together closely on projects, regardless of their physical locations, to achieve common goals. By definition, collaboration is not a technology, but rather a communication process which is reinforced by organisation culture, adopted and use with best practices and enhanced with proper tools and technology - especially on-demand tools. Synchronised or on-demand tools include presence technology, content sharing solutions, video and voice conferencing, and most recently telepresence.

Benefits and business value

The benefits and business value of effective collaboration are quickly apparent to the entire marketing organisation at multiple levels: work flow, employees, partners, and company return on investment (ROI).

Benefits will flow down through the department in the form of sharpened marketing processes and efficiency, impressive innovation and creative thinking, better decision-making and morale levels of employees. In fact, there are some growing application areas within many organisations where collaboration solutions are being used to improve workflow productivity. These include:

• Global team meetings
  
• Virtual 1:1s with CMO
  
• Strategic planning sessions
  
• Creative process
  
• Project and event management
  
• Product definition, launch, life cycle management
  
• Design review and approval
  
• Editor and analyst briefings
  
• Sales training
  
• Customer demos and presentations
  
• Partner meetings and councils

The crux - enabling a dynamic marketing team through collaboration - surely a competitive advantage!

While the technology acts only as an enabler, collaboration requires strong leadership with excellent communication skills to establish a culture of collaboration and a spirit of working together. Additionally, there must be a commitment to collaboration tools, where usage and adoption in marketing applications are encouraged and value and cost savings measured.

Despite the challenges CMOs face, there are solutions available today that will not only accelerate marketing workflow and business processes, increase productivity and staff satisfaction, but also contain cost, travel time and carbon footprint - all while ensuring a competitive advantage. Certainly worth the investment, don't you agree?