The Client: Firmenich create perfumes and flavours for the world’s most desirable brands. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Firmenich is the largest family owned business in the global perfumery and flavour business. With a turnover of 4.3 billion Swiss francs and over 5,900 employees operating in 57 organisational entities worldwide, Firmenich is a world famous perfume and flavour house.
The Challenge: The newly appointed global head of marketing based in Geneva, had inherited a global marketing community that required a cohesive global marketing strategy. We were asked to help her create a global marketing strategy that would be appreciated by the key stakeholders in the business, re-position marketing as one of the key contributors to the success of the company and build commitment and a sense of one community within the global marketing leaders dispersed around the world.
The Work We Did: We provided coaching support to the global head of marketing and helped her understand what the key corporate stakeholders actually wanted from her function and what they felt they got now. We then ran a number of internal sessions with her own corporate team and their key internal stakeholder groups to explore the value inherent in the internal relationships and helped them produce a plan to ensure the corporate marketing team re-focused their energy and enthusiasm towards delivering services that were actually valued by the company.
We then used this work to design and deliver a global marketing conference in which the marketing leaders from around the world came to Geneva in order to build an effective global marketing community. Our innovative ‘Value for Time’ conference design injected new energy into this diverse group and the resulting strategy and implementation plans have helped re-establish ‘marketing’ as a key internal function.
The Outcomes: Marketing is now better appreciated and used as a key internal function in support of the Development and Sales functions. The energy created by the workshops was used to fuel a re-direction of support activity within the marketing function and new services are now much more valued by the key internal stakeholders.