Published on March 1, 2014 by PR Week
SAP’s Jonathan Becher speaks to Lindsay Stein about plans to simplify comms strategies and leveraging social media to listen to consumers.
How do marketing and communications work together at SAP?
When I joined the company six years ago, there wasn’t a single marketing department.
Marketing was embedded in the business units and regional functions, and there was a small corporate marketing unit that primarily looked after the brand.
Depending on how you interacted with the company, you got a slightly different story, so we felt more like a federation of loosely connected organizations.
In phase one, SAP created a single-brand entity for itself. Phase two was the story of what the brand is, and the third part was about bringing those disconnected components – primarily for marketing – together.
Part of what I worked on in the first 18 months was making the unit feel like one, because there are synergies when you work together. These efforts will continue in 2014, where we will continue to create more synergies between the two units.
They are not the same discipline, but we call them two sides of the same coin. We have started doing a better job. It’s a journey we are on. I won’t claim we have it all figured out, but it feels more holistic.
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