Marketoonist: "The Silo Syndrome" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
October 07, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

The Silo Syndrome

One of my favorite marketing observations comes from HP founder David Packard:

“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

Our customers don’t care about our org charts. They don’t care which department is responsible for what. When they interact with different parts of a business, all they see is one brand. That means that every functional part of a company has a marketing role to play, whether they think about it that way or not.

In 1988, a Goodyear manager named Phil Ensor coined the phrase “Functional Silo Syndrome” to describe how most organizations operate. He was inspired by the tall grain silos of his native rural Illinois, which reminded him of how departments, divisions, and geographies so often work in business: fragmented and insular.

The “Silo” metaphor caught on and the “syndrome” has only gotten more challenging as the complexity of businesses has increased.

I think that a big part of the marketing role is actually internal — helping the rest of the organization see the direct linkage between what they do and the end customers.

Years ago, I helped bring the method cleaning products brand from the US to the UK. We had a small scrappy cross-functional team in London. At the launch, out of necessity, we shared the responsibility of customer service. Instead of a call center, the phone number on our products would ring in our actual office and we took turns talking to consumers on the “clean phone”.

It was frustrating at times. One minute, we would be talking about supply chain issues or a promotion plan and the next we’d have to respond to Nigel from Edinburgh about a stain on his countertop. But it helped bring the customer into the room in a way I’d never seen before.

Our brand eventually outgrew the “clean phone”, but I think it helped with our “Functional Silo Syndrome.” It reminded everyone in the office every day, from accounting, to product development, to marketing, who we ultimately worked for.

Live from Bucharest

I’m posting this from Bucharest, Romania while getting ready to speak at GPeC SUMMIT tomorrow. I look forward to meeting some of you there, as well as some of these other spots over the next month:

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. And please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2008, back when I called this cartoon Brand Camp.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.