Ensuring Alignment on Copromotions copromotion Lisa Sasson, VP Alignment specialists are trained to use and moderate interventions, such as alignment meetings, decision-making frameworks, joint conflict-resolution plans, and critical negotiation. BrandEdge For many marketers, these situations are all too familiar: • Your comarketing partner on a major strategic brand moves ahead with a press announcement about a key milestone without consulting you first. The announcement has important financial implications for both companies. • Meetings with your copromotion partner conclude with no one taking responsibility for key actions. As a result, decisions are delayed, objectives are not met, and tension builds between the two companies. • Your team learns of an important scientific publication involving the copromotion product just two days in advance of its release. Because of the lack of communication from your partner, there’s little time for you to take full advantage of what could have been a major positioning platform for the brand or to prepare to deflect negative press. Unfortunately, these scenarios are not unusual. They happen frequently in copromotion arrangements. Ensuring alignment is a challenge whenever multiple players from different organizations, disciplines, channels, or business and communications partners come together to make key strategic decisions or work toward a larger goal. Misalignment is costly, but straightforward interventions can prevent and often remedy misaligned copromotion partners. Getting Started on the Right Foot One way for marketers to prevent failures is to establish regular alignment meetings. This is a formal mechanism that ensures agreement among the key players on crucial strategies and tactics, such as: • Establishing the vision for success; • Setting objectives; • Clarifying roles and responsibilities; • Mapping key strategic decisions; • Creating a framework for effective and efficient decision making; and • Planning for working through conflict. An alignment meeting can occur at the start of a new relationship or during the middle of the relationship. An alignment meeting offers management a way to establish a decision-making framework. A decision-making framework helps identify critical business decisions early on and creates a plan for how the strategic partners will work together going forward. This includes agreement on decision-making roles. For instance, teams should clarify: who the actual decision-makers are because not every team member will be in control of every decision; who needs to be consulted about decisions since some team members or peripheral players may offer expertise and input without having a deciding vote; and who ultimately needs to be informed once decisions are made because decisions are only effective once key players are aware of them. Preparing for Battle or a Peace Plan Alignment meetings and a strong decision-making framework lay the foundation to prevent misalignment. But as conflicts can still occur, strategic partners should develop a healthy working process to avoid the potential for relationship-damaging conflict. A joint conflict-resolution plan, which is an agreement between partners, allows team members to address conflicts together at the source before issues escalate to senior management. Team members often bring issues of contention to their supervisors before discussing them with their “partner opponent.” This, of course, can cause even greater strain on team relationships. A joint conflict-resolution plan provides adversarial partners with a forum to find consensus, with or without a moderator, to: • Discuss the viewpoints and the interests driving their positions; • Brainstorm potential options to resolve the conflict; • Weigh the pros and cons of new potential options; and • Attempt to achieve agreement on one of these options. If this process does not produce agreement, only then should both partners jointly raise the issue to senior management. Then, the conflicting team members are required to review talking points from the meeting with their supervisors, including viewpoints and brainstormed options, as well as the reasons they could not reach agreement. A joint conflict-resolution plan drives healthy discussions and, in some cases, the brainstormed options result in more innovative solutions than the original plan. What to Look for in Alignment Specialists Alignment specialists are particularly skilled at listening with an unbiased ear to difficult situations and offering an objective diagnosis of the problem. Multiple factors likely contribute to alignment problems and a third-party alignment specialists’ objectivity can help recognize and remedy these situations. With well-tuned listening skills, an alignment specialist is adept at encouraging people to break down barriers by disclosing their true thoughts. Keeping quiet in team settings doesn’t necessarily prevent conflict; it only delays the inevitable. By persuading people to raise their concerns in a constructive way, alignment specialists can help partners address and prepare for problems early on. Alignment specialists are trained to use and moderate interventions, such as alignment meetings, decision-making frameworks, joint conflict-resolution plans, and critical negotiation. Because relationships and the nature of conflict can differ across groups, these skills are particularly important. BrandEdge, New York, a joint venture between GCI Group and Grey Healthcare Group, is a specialized consultancy that focuses on providing clients with a high level of strategic thinking, backed by proprietary offerings that uncover and capitalize on unique marketing and branding opportunities. For more information, visit brandedgeglobal.com. September 2004 VIEW on Marketing

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