Who is killing your brand within your organization? Sorry about the dramatic heading but I honestly feel that people who play havoc with the corporate logo or template are seriously killing the brand and seriously damaging the reputation. Every time someone tries to do that, your brand identity is at stake. As a marketing professional, it is nightmarish for me to make mockery of the company logo and templates. I get utterly irritated to see images or logos being ruthlessly stretched to a point where they are no longer recognizable. Yes, I’m trying to tell you how distressing Shadow Marketing is. There is a lot of conflict between sales and marketing teams because of – yes, you guessed it right – Shadow Marketing. For example, the sales team, in a lot of situations, will roll out their own email campaigns without keeping the marketing team in loop.
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Shadow Marketing is often compared with Shadow IT. We understand Shadow IT as the use of software by people in the organization without explicit permission. To define, Shadow Marketing is when groups, other than Marketing of course, start to do things their own way that somewhat threatens the marketing strategy and execution. It is not just limited to Marketing but it can happen with other departments too. For example, what if the Marketing department purchases something from a vendor not in the list of approved vendor. That will be bypassing the Purchasing department. There might be restrictions from the Legal department on what to publish (or not publish) on social media channels.