Despite genuine best efforts, well-informed discussions with comprehensive plans and executive PowerPoints can remain stuck in limbo. Sometimes strategy fails to be translated into execution and, more importantly, value generation.

Considering retail’s evolution into a complex omnichannel landscape that merges online with offline and traditional with modern, the organization and synchronization of marketing and trade marketing activities has become increasingly challenging.  To build brands, companies must consider each customer interaction across all channels and how they should be activated. Visibility of all these interactions and building an effective strategy to control them is challenging.

Yet what is often most demanding is the day-to-day coordination and management of your team and activities in order to guarantee that your brand strategies are realized across channels as planned.

Without the necessary discipline and processes that guarantee effective collaboration between teams, companies experience various execution challenges that ultimately impact conversion at the point of sale (POS).

Organizations, as a result, suffer in many ways:

• Inability to successfully execute brand plans
• Miscommunication between decision makers and operational staff
• Difficulty in knowing how to prioritize
• Diminishing internal capabilities due to over-reliance on agencies or partners
• High turnover impacting knowledge retention and training
• Incapacity to reorient towards new Go-to-Market strategies

We support our clients to translate strategy into execution through targeted and tailored actions that improve business operations across 3 fronts:

1. Developing the organization and management of the marketing and trade marketing areas, ensuring well-defined roles and responsibilities between teams.
2. Optimizing processes to ensure integrated execution of internal and external activities
3. Strengthening relationships and governance models to optimize collaboration and alignment among local, regional and global organizational structures.

Throughout the project we rely on a multifunctional team which brings your senior team members, together with Integration professionals, using a project ‘war room’ to unravel and address your unique challenge. This means that our solutions are grounded in reality, and we can build momentum from day one. So, whilst there are often natural tensions in the working relationships between marketing and trade marketing, our experience in change management ensures alignment, consensus and buy-in from the operational to the executive levels across both functions.

• Clearer understanding of performance across channels, empowering decision makers
• Higher revenues from improved customer needs alignment across channels
• Better efficiency in marketing spend, driven by collaboration and clarity
• More agility to respond to customer needs

We bring an outside-in perspective which can help unlock the potential that already exists inside your organization.

We are convinced that our clients know their business better than anyone else. At the same time, we provide outside experience, proven methodologies and cross-industry benchmarks that help them to overcome their challenges.

To build up your marketing and trade marketing capabilities, we take a step by step approach that ensures we (i) understand you and your business, (ii) develop a tailored solution grounded in reality and (iii) road-test the solution with you to overcome any teething issues and prepare you for the future. This typically translates into 3 project stages:

Throughout this journey we take into consideration not just your people but also the technology you have at your disposal. Plans, processes and tracking can all be integrated into the tools you already use as part of your day to day – whether that’s Salesforce of Microsoft Teams etc. This means there is no need to implement expensive or highly customized systems to support the rituals and processes we design with you.

Whilst Integration does not believe in ‘copy and paste’ solutions, we have developed templates and frameworks through our cross-industry experience that help our clients to orient themselves around best practices and break down difficult issues. A framework which often supports our analysis considers the macro-processes that marketing and trade marketing must address to succeed. It considers the natural interdependencies of the functions whilst clearly outlining the needs and exclusive spaces that each must fulfil.

The Marketing & Trade Marketing areas have complementary roles in organizations and must work together to deliver:

• Differentiation – ensuring that product USPs are clearly communicated
• Organization – ensuring coordination and synchronisation across all brand activation levers
• Velocity – ensuring rapid adjustment to customer needs and environmental changes
• Relationships – ensuring connections at a B2B and B2C level