• Brand: failure to recognize the impact of a company’s culture on their brand and overall customer experience. An area that we are passionate about, and what we refer to as activating the brand (essentially employees embodying the brand), is critical for a brand to achieve its full potential and appropriately manifest itself in the marketplace across all stakeholder touch-points.
• Marketing & Sales alignment: inability for marketing and sales functions to respect each other, collaborate, and align in the best interests of the organization in order to accelerate and improve the purchasing process. An age-old business challenge that can only be addressed if there is mutual respect and understanding of how each function can best collaborate to deliver on the overall organizations goals.
• Marketing performance: lack of respect for marketing analytics/operations to measure and improve marketing performance. We whole-heartily believe that the best companies measure, learn and improve over time and this requires having an appreciation and belief in the science of marketing as well as the art.

The learning that I would pass on is when faced with a business challenge first ask yourself if there is a cultural problem associated with the challenge. In many cases without addressing the cultural aspect, all of the fancy planning and strategery will undoubtedly fall short of expectations.

Tags: brand management, culture, cultureal problem, customer experience, David Brooks, General Motors, Marketing Performance, New York Times