a realisation that having 6 separate marketing teams in one country is probably 5 too many?
There's something to be said for having a marketing team on site that knows your local capabilities.
I used to work at an R&D firm with a number of different activities at different sites. Most of the exciting engineering work happened at the Pennsylvania HQ, but I worked in a southerly lab site bought on the cheap when the Cold War ended. It had some great lab facilities and worked on military programs for composites and corrosion abatement. Which meant I got to do such exciting things as watching steel rust over a period of months and write reports on the experience. My office gradually withered over 9 years from 120 personnel to 10, when I was laid off. It closed a few months after I was booted out the door.
My site's chronic problems were:
1) The rest of the company didn't know we existed, and
2) The marketing folks couldn't sell us to customers when they remembered we existed.
Predictably, marketing people were based out of the Pennsylvania HQ. Marketing is a reasonable HQ function. But if those marketing people found out we existed, we were a bullet in their 20-page presentations ("excellent accelerated environmental testing lab") and they never reminded the HQ engineers we were supposed to be used on the new contracts. Sometimes we invited marketing folks down to our facility, where they got the deluxe tour, a vacation on sunny beaches, and learned what we did. ("So...you make metals rust?") They never never quite figured out how that was important to marketing an R&D firm. (Like the larger US economy, the DoD loses about 5% of its annual budget to corrosion-related hardware wear and tear. There's research money in them thar hills.) Being based out of the HQ, they were immersed in very different engineering capabilities than an environmental test lab.
I would really have loved to have seen an on-site marketing team who knew local capabilities inside and out, and how to market environmental test capabilities. Instead we got military retirees hired for their contacts and networking in the DoD, plus rural Pennsatuckey used car salesmen who wouldn't know ASTM B-117 salt fog testing from design of experiments.
Hell, I would've liked it if the rest of the company knew we existed. It was awesome to coordinate testing with the facilities at HQ and have a lab minion say, "Well, we can't start the corrosion testing for three months."
Me: "Er, why?"
HQ lab: "Well, our tiny salt fog chamber is backed up for three months. It's in high demand since it's the only salt fog chamber in the company."
Me: "...We have three giant, programmable, humidity / temperature / salt fog chambers down here hungry for work."
HQ lab: "Really, I never knew about those."
Me: "We sent pamphlets and gave presentations to you."
HQ lab: "Oh, those. That was five years ago and we forgot."
On site marketing hacks who knew and understood our capabilities would've been great. Centralized personnel can lose touch with local capabilities of big organizations.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
