Marketing Plus HR

I’m a big believer in marketing as a transformational function in a business. The right marketing can totally change its trajectory. That may not be surprising given that I work with business leaders on making their marketing work.

I have a friend, Ian Charpentier, who is an HR leader. He does similar work for CEOs related to their HR challenge. And we were talking the other day, and no surprise, he feels the same way about HR and its importance, but he said something else that really caught my attention. Marketing and HR may be great individually, but let them work together and they can do even more for a business. And he has a real point. I want to talk a little bit about what I think he meant by that.

People
First, both HR and marketing are people focused. Marketing’s job is my belief is to build and strengthen relationships between you and your prospects and your customers. That’s why they exist. Well, likewise, HR means human relations. It’s in the name. Their focus is on the relationships between employees and employees in general, right? So there’s a common language between those two departments, a common perspective on what’s important and even a common skillset that those two organizations can build on with each other. 

Culture
Secondly, both marketing and HR prioritize culture. Good marketing starts with a core understanding of what the purpose of a business is. Why are we here? What do we create? How does it help our customers? That leads to a set of values and priorities that really affects the culture, and the stronger the culture, the better that marketing story can be. HR has culture usually on their list of deliverables, their priorities, right? Their role is to strengthen that culture and make it solid within the company. So there’s another case where both marketing and HR are heading the same direction and have the same purpose in mind. So there’s opportunities for them to amplify each other’s work.

One Story
And finally, when that happens, there’s another, it’s rare but powerful effect. And that is when the company communicates in all its different ways with one story, every employee, every website, every product, all talk about the company’s purpose and value in the same or similar way. That consistency and coherence resonates in the market. And it’s hard to do, but HR and marketing with their focus on relationships and culture are perfectly positioned to make it happen.

So most organizations are keeping marketing and HR separate. They’re separate silo, separate leaders, and that may be appropriate, but I encourage you as a business leader to take a close look at the opportunity to unite those two functions and let them help each other. And I think you’ll find that you’ll get a much better output from the combined effort than you would from those two being treated separately.