May 19, 2008

Marketing and HR have to talk

On CNBC-Tv18 one of my favourite programs is Storyboard. A week ago they ran a special episode anchored by Nokia India's head honcho Shivakumar.

The theme for the episode was advertising and branding of pure services businesses. They did a feature on airlines and showcased Kingfisher Airlines as a case study and also looked at a pure consulting business and talked to a Partner at Bain & Co, in India.

The learning was that services businesses are people related. Their behavior and skills is the actual product that the client/buyer is paying for. And then reporter said one thing "Marketing has to get off its ivory tower and talk to HR to actually build the brand in reality"

That's so true.

If your brand promise is something else and your recruiters and HR generalist select and measure people against other standards, you're setting up your services organization for a failure in front of your customers.

Is your a services organization? How much does Marketing and Branding work along with HR?

2 comments:

  1. "Marketing and HR have to talk"
    Well, cynics would say that's all they do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gautam, couldn't agree more. Marketing and HR really need to talk and look at ways where they can work together in building great brands and high performance organizations.
    We at Gallup use a concept called HumanSigma (http://www.gallup.com/consulting/17575/humansigma.aspx)through which we provide tools for managing employee & customer experiences together and not looking at them as separate entities. The underlying philosophy being that the "employee-customer" interaction is the factor floor of today's service organizations. These interactions make or break the brand. We have had a few foreign companies even thinking about merging the HR & Marketing depts. to deploy HumanSigma effectively.

    Abhishek
    http://abhishekmittal.com

    ReplyDelete