Moving People between Functions
Cross-functional moves between R&D and Marketing Departments are not easy because of the specialized nature of their activities. Starting with the recruitment phase, companies need to work at attracting people who can be useful across functions and can be placed in a variety of environments. Moreover, focused internal development programs need to support the mobility of staff.
The Development of Informal Social Systems
This aim is not easily achieved because it cannot be forced upon people, but recreational activities can encourage informal social interaction in a light-hearted way. Here too, much can be achieved by minimizing the physical distance between the functions. Fruitful collaboration often occurs unexpectedly around central coffee points.
Changing the Organizational Design
General Electric and Philips have many coordination groups that bring together specializations in a balanced way. With good management stimulating cross-fertilization, many cultural and linguistic barriers can be crossed. The matrix organization is another option in which functional specialists carry on reporting to their particular boss and have a "dotted line" responsibility toward the project leader.
A More Focused Reward System
It appears that marketing staff very often have a variable reward system that is linked to market share. Developers frequently receive their bonuses on the basis of technological developments. A reward system that is very dependent on how much information is transferred across functions will have a positive effect on the revenues and profitability of a company.
Formal Management Processes Such as Project Management Can Add Much to the Effectiveness of the Integration between R&D and Marketing
This is how Mitsubishi, for example, developed the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process whereby the client, via a program called "Qualityhouse," was given a coordinating role between marketing and R&D. Such processes seem to decrease market uncertainties as well as having a positive effect on the innovative power of an organization. This has now been extended further to DFD - Design-Function-Deployment (see Jebb and Woolliams, 2000).
However, even in the event of an organization following all of the above advice, ultimate success will depend on the quality of leadership and the organizational culture in which these processes need to unfold. In this context, let's look further at Bang & Olufsen.
Technical Excellence and the Emotional Climate
Anders Knutsen saw himself confronting the tension between technical excellence and emotional appeal. The latter was a subtle and diffuse concept. Beautiful audio-visual information had to be conveyed on instruments worthy of their content, in the same way that the instruments of an orchestra carry the spirit of the composer and express that composer's feeling. "Time is in our favor," Knutsen said. "The world is flooded with discount junk products that strive to become classics, and products with emotional value will be strongly placed in our 'throwaway' culture" (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 2001).
In the history of B&O both technical excellence and emotional climate had been important, more so than sales or marketing, but even these leading values had not been reconciled or harmonized. First one was dominant and then the other, and their fight for dominance had made the product which resulted unaffordable. So Knutsen created "Idealand," a non-localized space where engineers, music lovers, designers, and others, both within R&D and outside the company in the community of experts, could engage in an dialog that would both stimulate ideas and balance them.
Another balance is between the audio and the visual that come together in digital sound pictures. Carl Henrik Jeppesen, B&O's chief engineer, explained to us: "We send development teams, usually to the US, to study what sounds and sights are being made and consumed. They go to concerts, music studios, discotheques, clubs. You need someone to champion the original sound picture and the emotions generated from them and someone to champion the technologies of recording and playing those sound pictures. It is this creative clash between the artists and engineers that gives you optimal integration. In the old days one competence would dominate the others but no more. There came the day when Anders Knutsen and his team refused to sponsor a prototype product because the costs were out of line. That was a real shock for all of us. It had never happened here!
"We now test our products with our customers and if they like them, sales start at once with a projected product life of ten years. We position ourselves in the market in such a way that it confirms or fails to confirm the hypotheses developed in Idealand. The latter is no private muse, but a testing laboratory for viable ideas, a set of hypotheses to which our customers say yes or no" (Private communication).
B&O elicited this dilemma, which they defined in their own words as:
On the one hand...
On the other hand...
An aesthetic and emotional commitment to the beauty of sights and sounds recorded and played
An engineering and technological commitment to brilliant scientific solutions
In our conceptual framework, this is expressed as:
On the one hand...
On the other hand...
Particularism of art Diffuseness of experience Affective
Universalism of science Specificity of solution Neutral
This is illustrated in Figure 9.4. Thus B&O's dilemma actually touches on three of our dimensions.
Figure 9.4: Reconciling universalism with particularism at Bang & Olufsen
There is the diffuse and affective experiences of particular art forms and the specific neutrality of scientific and universal solutions. B&O had two strong traditions, often at odds with one another and hence tilting the balance of power, now this way and now that. On the vertical axis of Figure 9.4 we have the engineering commitment to specific scientific solutions and on the horizontal axis the aesthetic and emotional commitment to music and visual art forms.
As we've seen, to counterbalance the strong influence of R&D, teams were sent to the US and elsewhere to try to capture the ineffable qualities of new sounds and sights, so that these could be faithfully rendered. You have to love what you are trying to reproduce in high fidelity, in order to convey the genuine experience. It is in Idealand that these various values met, clashed, and achieved a final harmony. Each group championed their own values until these found inclusion in a larger system and in a more creative synthesis - all watched over by a principle of parsimony that sought to cut costs to the bone.
THE COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF MARKETING ACROSS CULTURES
Finally the problem for marketers is that there has been no commonly accepted framework that relates models of cross culture and reconciliation to bottom-line business results. Supplier, distributor, and buyer give different emphasis to individual or team efforts, different emphasis to personal relationships within business, different emphasis to status of older, more experienced staff, different emphasis on the present and future, etc. But what does this mean in terms of marketing strategy? What are the consequences for prioritizing resource allocation and strategic decision making in marketing planning when trying to put effort and/or resource into reconciling these dilemmas? How can we synergize these models of cross culture with the marketing planning formulation process? These questions have gone unanswered for too long.