CASE STUDY:
TRANSFORMING A GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY MARKETING ORGANIZATION TO DELIVER ON A NEW CORPORATE STRATEGY
The Situation...
Lexmark International (F500 technology company) had just completed an LBO and were looking to transform their company from a sleepy division of IBM into a printer powerhouse. Steve was hired as the CMO to overhaul their marketing department – and, ultimately, help transition the company from an engineering-led to a customer-led organization.
Challenge
After interviewing the entire Marketing team, as well as the key leaders within the other functional areas (Sales, Finance, Operations, R&D, Manufacturing) it became clear that Marketing was perceived to be nothing more than a reactive advertising & communications “order-taker” department. Most of the team were legacy engineers who did not have any formal background in marketing. Further, the team was not well respected across the rest of the organization. Globally, there was no connection within the Marketing function – each country developed their own strategies, and communicated directly with the other functional areas (e.g., the UK would call R&D directly to request new product development for their geography).
Action
Steve started by restructuring the US marketing team, replacing about 25% of the team with strategic marketing talent. He then restructured the team and assigned roles based on individual talents and career aspirations. He then worked with the other functional areas to refocus the team’s mandate to be a data-drive, customer insights based product strategy and development team. He worked with the other geographies to establish a new organizational and operating model with very clear roles and responsibilities. He commissioned a comprehensive 17-country market research program to gather insights on customer usage and attitudes – including focus groups and surveys of thousands of consumers across the world. Importantly, he included all of the functional areas throughout the process….delivering many eye-opening experiences to the R&D, Product Design and other functions. Based on this research, Steve and the team developed a 10/3/1 year strategic product development plan that was fully agreed across the enterprise.
Result
Within two years, market share more than doubled, while R&D and manufacturing expenses dropped dramatically. As a result of this success, Steve was asked to build out a new division for the company to focus on small & medium businesses (another case study!)