I work at a large, global company that is integrating their brand across the planet. They are pushing all brand capital to the highest level. In so doing, they expect to gain from having thousands of business units across the world pushing in the same direction. Makes sense to me.

A huge branding push like this only works if there is a consistent look and feel, logo treatment, voice and graphical identity. It helps if the brand is conveyed in communications developed by professional writers, graphic artists, digital marketing experts and other marketing professionals.

In the past, I have seen several departments go rogue, and create their own marcom pieces. Sales teams are usually the main culprits, but I have seen Product Development teams engage in this as well. Slapping together their own “marketing” materials, and releasing them to audiences of dozens, hundreds or even worse, thousands.

Ten years ago, you needed to be a fairly strong user of MS Word, Excel and Outlook to put together a half decent looking mail merge.

Today, it is shockingly easy for a Sales Rep to bombard 5000+ customers with an email filled with typos, creative offers not approved by the proper channels, or a logo cut from Google images as a low-quality jpeg. Product teams likewise can put together materials to hand out to customers that cramp the logo, take screen shots that are of a poor quality, and assemble this with language that is completely untied from any action.

I have two points here:

• As marketers, it is our job to provide enough value that this kind of behaviour is not even considered. Could you picture a sales rep from Apple or Google pushing their own email blasts out to prospects? Not likely.
• The other is that I have every confidence Apple or Google would severely discipline operators that went rogue by creating their marketing materials.

This happened recently and I found about the DIY piece in a round-about way. What will I do?

I will have a stern word with the creators in an open meeting, so that all present know that this is not okay. Further, I’d like to address the root problem — Why is it that you don’t feel you can rely on the Marketing department to provide you with customer-facing materials?

I anticipate that a bit of open dialogue should be able to remedy this situation.