Optimize Value In, not Cost Out
Can procurement be the guardians of better value for brands they serve? What’s wrong with the word optimization? Let’s reframe a vision for marketing procurement, with some practical tips for better questions we can start asking tomorrow. Tom Denford explored some of these themes in conversation with T-Mobile’s Director of Marketing and Supply Chain Procurement, David Hale.
Tom said “we are sensing a shift in marketing procurement, we are in a transformational time now”. The trade associations, such as the ANA, WFA, and IPA, have provided a lot of insight and guidance to become better aligned and maximize the value that goes into brands.
Marketing procurement is evolving and is making the industry better. The industry needs marketing procurement to be strong — agencies, marketers, and everyone needs this strong partnership.
Procurement should be the guardians of the value for the brand — drive the optimization of the brand, optimizing the value in, not just the cost out. This means committing to continuous incremental improvement through a procurement strategy.
Questions to ask yourself — how can we optimize our internal capabilities? Are we working productively with our agencies and other external partners? How good are they? How can we optimize our investments? By using optimization as a strategic framework, you will continuously optimize value.
David Hale, Director of Marketing & Supply Chain Procurement at T-Mobile brings this approach to procurement, and when he arrived at T-Mobile he had the opportunity to take a step back and challenge the status quo and move the needle forward. That journey has earned him and his team a place inside the strategic planning process of the future state of the marketing organization and the direction where they go. Marketing Procurement is in the room, designing the new T-Mobile for the past two years.
T-Mobile operates in a highly competitive environment, and sourcing helped rationalize and co-developed the internal capabilities around optimization. They helped taking some capabilities in-house and we constantly drive justification for strategic investments and define what is the right way forward. By working this way, procurement earned its place at the table with other internal stakeholders.
With their external partners, T-Mobile has developed an agency roster that focus more on the strategic and top-of-the funnel marketing, and this has helped agencies have a better focus and thus deliver better results for T-Mobile. Procurement started driving agency management, involving agencies to provide feedback and take that to become better inside T-Mobile. It has become a safe forum for all partners to share feedback and drive improvements. This in turn has elevated marketing procurement to new levels of impact, influence and allows them to take on the empowerment that senior leadership offers within T-Mobile.
Advice to marketing procurement
Listen to all the advice in the industry but be bold.
Stop waiting for a nod to become involved.
