Garrett listed the team’s six success factors: the drivers; the engine; reliability; aerodynamics; mechanical grip; and teamwork. This last factor was “absolutely critical in any business”, he said.
“For us it’s not an option, but a discipline.We have institutionalised teamwork. For our employees we take the trouble to relate what the person does all week to what they see on the TV in the race. It’s important though that if you are going to have empowerment you also have responsibility. If someone makes a mistake, they need to feel responsible for the car going wrong and fellow employees not getting their points bonus.”
Very quick decision making is one of the strong cultural factors at Williams, helped by the absence of matrix management which is “the enemy of empowerment”, said Garrett, with “lots of power of veto but not of approval”.Williams’ own brand image was also distinctive; unlike its competitors in Formula 1, the team is a “racing purist”. Other teams had been created as an extension of an existing brand, and were part of that brand’s marketing effort, he pointed out.
“We are there just to race.We spend everything on the car, so our P&L should be zero every year,” said Garrett. Asked from the floor what was expected of the team’s blue chip sponsors, he replied: “If we are running at the front of the race, this provides a lot of value for our partners. However, at Williams and in other sports, sponsorship is no longer about how big is the cheque and the sticker. It’s about a deeper relationship between us, and between the partners themselves.
“What I’m doing by bringing them together is giving the head of marketing the ammunition to say to the board: ‘here is why I’m spending £6 million on sponsoring Williams’. They’ve got to help us win though.We are strongly demanding, and they have got to want to participate.”
 Another brand with a distinctive culture, and one which is highly responsive to the culture of the society it exists within, is organic chocolate maker Green & Black, whose global brand director Mark Palmer spoke at the Marketing Forum. The brand’s own journey has taken it from being a niche organic brand to premium mainstream, fighting societal perceptions that organic meant inferior quality along the way.
The company only began in 1991, and in 2001 set out on a strategic repositioning that has proved to be a pivotal moment in its success. The origination of the name is rather straight forward: green for organic, and black for dark chocolate. Focus groups prior to the repositioning painted a depressing picture. One woman in a focus group referred to the Green & Black bar in disparaging terms as “charity chocolate” without even trying it.
“We needed to sort out our packaging because the design was not communicating quality; it was communicating worthiness. After that we started to say, let’s not be too clever with the marketing. The lights switch on for people when they taste the chocolate,” said Palmer. |
Aside from the physical appearance of the brand’s product though, there needed to be a change in the way that the company viewed itself if it really wanted to grow its business beyond being simply the strongest player in a niche market, Palmer explained. One brand manager questioned the wisdom of changing the brand’s direction, saying Green & Black already had 97% of its market. Palmer’s response was that this was 97% of the organic chocolate market, which did not really exist. In the real chocolate market, its presence was miniscule.
“I said today we go from 97% to 0.0-whatever per cent; we become a feisty challenger brand within the chocolate world. We changed the kind of people we employed, to those who were interested in chocolate, not just organic.”
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What came next was a more extensive segmentation of customers, and Green & Black categorised a number of types of existing or potential customers: those that liked green cuisine; everyday luxury eaters, who were generally older people that loved brands; those who were time poor but food rich, such as London commuters; and adventurous “foodies”.
In 2001, Green & Black saw that those in the first and last of these categories were already buying the product, but this was only 7% of UK households. Next on the target list became the time poor/food rich, which accounted for one in four UK households. The strategy used was “discovery marketing”, said Palmer.Without a big marketing budget, Green & Black used word of mouth and seeding to give consumers the chance to discover the brand, rather than it being forced upon them. |