Pronaca brand mark, shown in the portfolio's two-tone palette. Source: company brand assets. Trademark belongs to its owner.
Thirty people serve thirty brands, and each of them knows what they may decide today without asking. That is how I ran Pronaca's corporate marketing function: three written remits, one page of decision rights, a $2 million digital budget, and the agencies and universities around it.
Pronaca brand mark, shown in the portfolio's two-tone palette. Source: company brand assets. Trademark belongs to its owner.
An org chart says who reports to whom. Decision rights say who may decide what without asking — and which methodologies each role must define rather than borrow. That is the document that replaces the escalations.
Thirty brands in one consolidated cycle — $2.9 M livestock, $5.8 M value-added, $2.8 M corporate.
Placed by the role accountable for its return, brought down 40% with performance intact.
A head chef, three chefs, five promoters, an assistant: live video recipes, courses, food-service workshops, every launch event.
Consumer communication for the master brand and the portfolio; two-way channels under one CRM strategy; content evaluated for the generations it was meant for; the insight loop that reports what it did.
Live video recipes, hands-on courses, food-service workshops on product use and recipe costing, design-thinking panels for R&D, every launch event.
Requests, complaints and claims as one workflow; two-way service by phone and digital; the consumer, supplier and customer base; a standing input to the quality plan.
| The role owns | Which means |
|---|---|
| Digital media buying, corporate and brand | The budget is placed by the person accountable for its return |
| Use of digital media for the master brand and the businesses | Brands ask for a cohort, not for a channel |
| The method for reading trends in social and digital | One way of listening, so insights are comparable |
| The kind of insight that feeds the strategy | The committee gets decisions, not dashboards |
| The benchmarking method, local and international | Against the industry, not against last quarter |
Scope, fees and performance. Owning the negotiation is what keeps a two-million-dollar budget from becoming a two-million-dollar habit.
A standing source of interns and junior talent for a function that needed people who could write, cook, analyse and answer a phone.
Written remits, decision rights and content pillars are the reason the same thirty people could absorb a second endorsement brand, a national competition and a contact centre without adding a department for each.
Every team knows what it owns, and requests stop arriving in order of insistence.
Ours took on a second brand, a national competition and a contact centre with the same thirty people.
Decision rights let the person accountable for a budget place it.