Global technology giant IBM sees a transformation under way in business that tests many of the assumptions of the modern multinational corporate model. Globalisation, combined with the web and the resulting ability of customers, investors, media and regulatory bodies to interact with each other, is overturning the corporation’s ability to segment audiences and messages, says Jon Iwata, IBM’s newly promoted senior vice-president of marketing and communications.
Just as the barriers between corporate stakeholders have dissolved, IBM seeks to remove the barriers between its communications functions. These include marketing, media and public relations, corporate communications and, eventually, the company’s “corporate citizenship” function, which is responsible for promoting IBM’s corporate values. The integration of marketing and communications under Mr Iwata’s stewardship began in July 2008, while the corporate citizenship group will be integrated into marketing and communications in the autumn.
The typical corporate structure, with a sales and marketing organisation to engage existing and prospective customers (largely through advertising) and a separate public relations team to communicate to the public at large through the media--plus other departments handling communications to investors, employees, government regulators and others--is outdated, Mr Iwata says. IBM’s reorganisation, in part, attempts to blend the customer insight and message development capabilities of its marketing organisation with the interactive and multi-audience skills of its communications group. “This is not about another reorganisation at IBM,” Mr Iwata says. “This is about rethinking marketing and communications and building a new kind of function, a new kind of capability.”
Traditional advertising and marketing approaches have not been rendered obsolete, though. Mr Iwata cites the blending of IBM television advertising during live events, such as National Football League games, with online searches that spike to 10-20 times their normal traffic during the broadcasts. Yet combining the traditional strengths of communications professionals with marketing will be critical to IBM.s consolidated organisation. “We have a lot of skills that we can tap into, but we have a lot more that we need to learn rapidly,” he says. “I think if you work backwards from the audience you’re trying to reach and the channels and methods you’ve used to try to reach them, it all argues for taking a much more integrated and contemporary approach to the work of marketing and communication.”
Among the skills that communications professionals bring to an integrated function, Mr Iwata cites the ability to be accountable for content--eg, media coverage--that they do not control, much like using social networks to deliver marketing messages. Traditional marketing is “all about control” over advertising content, placement and timing, among others. “And that’s great except when the world is moving to things that you cannot control. You can influence it. You can participate. But you cannot so easily control it.”
