Vodafone merges marketing, sales and corp comms, ‘no plans’ for agency shake-up
Vodafone has kicked off a major company restructure which will see marketing, sales and corporate communications merged into one.
In a leaked email to staff, Vodafone boss Nigel Dews said the company had fallen “short of our revenue growth aspirations” despite “strong” December sales, hence the restructure, according to a report in The Australian.
A Vodafone spokesman confirmed the news, but said there no plans to shake-up the company’s relationships with its marketing suppliers, which include ad agency Host and media agency Ikon.
Vodafone’s combined sales, marketing and corp comms team will be led by the current sales boss Noel Hamill, the spokesman confirmed.
Perhaps customer retention dept should be merged into that too? Unbelievable that it’s a separate department.
The Voda people do a good job on their marketing, the issue is really that the part of the product that they have little control over (ie the network quality) is either bad or perceived to be so.
After losing 378,000 customers because of rubbish coverage, I guess this is expected. Almost everyone I know moved off Vodafone last year.
I wonder if they fired the people responsible for the woeful migration of 3 and Voda. Epic fail with almost 500k customers churning out of Voda, most never to return. Tough that the marketing/sales people take the bullet.
Vodafone- biggest mobile phone brand in the world- No. 3 carrier In Aus. Long overdue!
+1 -> Tough that the marketing/sales people take the bullet.
The bigger question is: has Dews earned enough stripes to keep him seated at the top?
I’m far from confident that he’s the right man to pull Vodafone out of this. Perhaps replacing the CEO instead of the Exec team would have been a better move.
Thoughts?
I hear Three-dafone has 200 “analysts” working there. Surely they could have used customer experience analysis to predict the situation that got them to the point of sacking the wrong people
I agree with everyone, the marketing team has always great, however the technology issues they have had since migrating 3 mobile was a massive blunder. What is more frustrating than migration teething issues is the fact they still haven’t fixed it. If anything voda’s coverage is getting worst and their 3 million dollar upgrade to systems campaign has just pissed me off because there is worst service and coverage than ever before. Voda, get your sit together technology wise and leave the marketing dept. to do the great job they’ve been doing because if it weren’t for them the company would be in the gutter being spat on by passers-by.
they obviously don’t care about losing all their customers, if the flogging of new deals is anything to go by. just replace them as they walk out the door seems to be the strategy. so of course you’d put the sales boss in charge of marketing, that’s the way to do it – crunch some numbers and shout ‘deal’ as loud and as hard as you can.
as for customer marketing – all the evidence suggests that this is the poor cousin of that organisation.
the scariest thing is that vodafone are actually making telstra and optus look like attractive options.
and is there any wonder that they cannot get it together, they ‘move on’ from an agency relationship every 18 months, as clearly the sales team can do communications better than say, any sort of creative agency they might employ.
so many levels of woeful.
The CEO & senior management need to go! How can a Sales Director manage the Sales, Marketing & Comms channels? Spreading himself very thin. Are these decisions made in regards to what is the best for Vodafone, customers and staff or what the CEO and his directors want? Vodafone Group needs to step in and sort them out. Vodafone was a successful profitable company before and will be again one day, once management starts to ‘think & act smart’. Very sad, as so many great people will loose their jobs because of managements stupidity, lack of experience and poor decision making.
They cant give away their pre paid data modems at Coles ($24). Isnt the problem their network coverage in metro areas ?.Cant see any mention of how that gets fixed – Doh !
Nigel, time for you to go. You’ve screwed a great business, well and truly. And you’re blaming the marketing guy on a lack of sales?! Be a REAL leader; acknowledge that it is you that has lead the business into this dark, dark place and for the business to thrive ever again, you must go. Its only a shame that your shareholders haven’t got the guts up yet to push you out. Let me call it however – you’ll be jobless by Christmas, no doubt.