MMO 3: The benefits of centralisation

Our last email discussed the four forces of marketing technology: centralisation vs decentralisation, and humanisation vs. automation. This email discusses centralisation, one of the key elements of modern marketing operations.

When you are in a subsidiary office, the movement to centralise can feel like loss of control and autonomy. You may start to think that you cannot treat your customers as individuals, or tailor your approach to their needs. However, centralisation can actually help both you and the organisation to work better.

First benefit: achieving efficiencies and scale

When you centralise and automate processes and systems, you can achieve efficiencies. You can get much better economies of scale. Centralising customer data and analytical processes means that you can understand your customers better—and that means that you can serve them better both centrally and locally. In other words, the information that you obtain from centralising processes and data can help you to work better with individual customers at local level.

Second benefit: clearer brand definition and values

However, there is another side to centralisation: when it has a focus on humanisation, not automation. This allows better brand definition. This means that everyone has a much better understanding of the organisation’s values and mission. It also means that you as an individual can better represent the brand and demonstrate its values to customers.
The key is to centralise without losing the advantages of decentralisation: the speed of response, and the focus on individual customers and local markets. Finding the balance is crucial.