When Siddharth Taparia <a href="https://ir.jll.com/news-releases/press-release-details/2021/JLL-names-Siddharth-Taparia-Chief-Marketing-Officer/default.aspx” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>snared the CMO job at JLL in 2021, he was joining a global real estate services giant with 112,000 employees working out of 300 offices in more than 80 countries.
But those big numbers were actually Taparia’s biggest problem. The new marketing chief had no single marketing department to run.
“We operated as dozens and dozens of separate companies around the world,” Taparia told attendees of Brandweek, ADWEEK’s annual summit for marketing leaders and brand builders. “We had 100 different websites. We didn’t have any metrics. So, our work was really cut out for us.”
It would take several years for Taparia to meet his remit to “build a world-class marketing organization from the ground up.” But the complexities of that work centered on three organizational and technological steps. Here’s a primer on how he did it.
Clarify the brand first
Taparia’s first step was an initiative called “See a Brighter Way,” a positioning that gave potential clients a clear picture of what JLL was and what it could do for them-all on a single website.
“This brand platform gave us the ability to show our clients how we were able to give them better ideas, suggestions, show them a better path, a smarter way of doing things, a more intelligent way of doing things,” Taparia said.
Unite individual and company performance
Taparia believes that marketers can only “earn a seat at the table” by demonstrating how their work contributes to the strength of the brand overall. That calls for data on both the micro and macro levels. As Taparia explained it: “We started tying individual performance to marketing performance to company performance.”
JLL now bases marketers’ bonuses to the contributions they make to the company’s effectiveness. As a result, “marketing-originated revenue” for JLL has grown by triple digits over the last three years.
Approach AI as a shared experience
It’s a given that brands will tell employees to use AI, Taparia said, but the brand’s responsibility is to support that use: “You can’t expect them to do things if you are not giving them access to best-in-class AI tools.”
Critically, however, Taparia has framed AI as a collective, cultural ethos at JL-“creat[ing] an organization that’s ready to implement AI both at an individual level but at an organizational level, and turn that innovation into competitive advantage.”
This article was originally featured onAdweek.com.
