VideoThat's not to say that Lucius has been spending money carelessly. "Everyone's got to tighten his belt at the moment," the marketing director says. "I've done so every single year, whether it's been good or bad. The way I've done that is to look at clever ways to substitute an expensive activity with a cheap activity — offline for online, for example."
Park has the kind of finance-marketing teamwork that many companies lack. But CFOs who haven't yet started to break down the walls between finance and marketing needn't be disheartened — starting during a downturn is still preferable to not starting at all. As Parkes of Coleman Parkes puts it, "If [companies] make the decision now to toughen up and create that level of communication [between finance and marketing,] imagine what it's going to be like when we do come out of this."
Tim Burke is senior editor at CFO Europe.
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Seen It All
"What you see still in some companies is that the CMO and the CFO are not always working together," says Jesko Perrey, head of the European branding and marketing ROI practice at McKinsey & Company. In some, they may even see each other as opponents.
Imagine, then, being responsible for both functions. That task fell to Herbert Ortner of Palfinger, a €695m Austrian crane manufacturer, last year. When the CEO, Wolfgang Anzengruber, resigned in June to join another company, Ortner was promoted from CMO to replace him. If that wasn't a tough enough transition to handle, he had to take over interim duties as CFO until January 2009, as Anzengruber had also overseen finance. And, during it all, he had to help the new CMO, Wolfgang Pilz, get established.
After sitting on both sides of the finance-marketing divide in quick succession, Ortner has a rare level of insight into how the two teams need to change in order to work better together. "In many companies, I see that there is a big problem between the finance department and the marketing department," he says. The problem, he explains, is that many marketing professionals lack the financial know-how to read and understand balance sheets and P&L statements, and so struggle to understand how their work affects the company's financial performance. On the other hand, he adds, there are plenty of finance people who look down on marketing, and see little value in even trying to measure or analyse the work that marketing does.
But get the two teams to understand each other's work, he says, and the company benefits. "At the end of the day, it only works hand in hand."
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