Whirlpool Corporation Integrated Global Marketing Operations

The vision at Whirlpool is to integrate geographical businesses wherever possible and leverage capabilities in all operations. It has worked on two levels One is the global integration and the impact on host country marketing, and Second is within host country, especially how Whirlpool manage and how they drive local marketing.

In general, Whirlpool position in the market and in their strategy, they have three key pillars that form the foundation of their strategy in terms of competitive advantage. One is the building of a multi-brand portfolio in local market. They positioned it on a regional basis. The second is operating scale, which is the way they manage their business in local market. And the third is the global leverage scale they bring to the host marketplace.

Those are the three key elements that make Whirlpool different from their competitors and really the areas in which they believe they can create competitive advantage in the marketplace. Whirlpools products, communication, pricing and competitive moves are based on this local market positioning for their brand portfolio. In the appliance business, distribution is the crucial element of the marketing mix, especially how company manage

distribution and build partnerships with the trade. The influence of the sales person in the store at the point of sale is key because this is a low-incidence purchase and lowinvolvement product category. The basic marketing mix targeted at the consumer was similar across borders. Whirlpool executing through the trade gets to be very local and the whole deployment of the sales and marketing mix, particularly pricing, promotion and point-of-sale elements have to be tailored by the channel needs in a country. Whirlpool business may not be the most exciting of categories in terms of product Innovation as the impact it has on consumers lives and the value consumers place on the kinds of products they sell, its enormous. The potential to innovate with the core processes involved with use of home appliances (e.g., fabric care) is huge. Whirlpool strategy is very much based on starting with the consumer and accelerating the pace of innovation in this business. According to Ivan Menezes, vice president, group marketing, Whirlpool Europe., You have to be flexible, the not-invented-here syndrome is not acceptable, and you have to be picking up ideas and best practices from different markets and different parts of the business and transferring them rapidly. It does require an entrepreneurial, as opposed to a managerial, structured and disciplined approach. One of the more interesting parts of being in a global or a local/regional marketing role is that there is always so much going on. There is not enough time to go after all the opportunities that are on your plate and you are juggling lots of balls at the same time. It requires constantly picking and prioritizing the big opportunities and going at them and making decisions fast. Whirlpool prefers people who have different sales, marketing plus other cross functional experience. Ideally, cross-functional experience in terms of having done something outside of marketing, either leading a mega-project, having a project management role or working in finance or logistics. On the advertising front, which has worked well, Whirlpool created what they call an international creative council, which had members of the marketing or advertising people from the key countries. That council worked directly with the advertising agency, Publicis. They had the advertising agency do the same thing in that they tapped into the creative network across markets. Through the creative council, and the agency structure, Whirlpool get all the input and,

more importantly, buy-in from the local markets. As they developed the advertising, they have the key people and experts involved in the development of it and the approval of it. Whirlpool is building their position in local market of different regions through acquisitions and joint ventures. In India, for example, they acquired the largest manufacturer called Kelvinator of India. Quality Express originated in North America, and as a logistics concept it is very transferable around the world. They have dramatically rationalized the number of warehouses and they are building tailored service packages for different channels of distribution. In other words, there is lot of interchange, a lot of sharing of practice from North America to other regions. For market place the activities were managed at different levels of local market, to centrally in specific region. Globally, Whirlpool is adopting common processes; from the five core processes they have identified for the business in total is the brand management process. They spent a fair amount of time defining the brand management process between North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia and all sub-processes and then working on building common capabilities and how they manage each of the sub-processes around the world. Whirlpool manages regional/global accounts by transnational accounts. The sales organization is structured in a way that both at the area and at the central level there are people specifically to serve and manage these accounts. However, there is a multilevel customer relationship that needs to get built, in that the day-to-day business typically continues at the national level and really what you are setting at the regional level is building the basic framework for the partnership. Typically, the daily basic selling and servicing of the account happens in the national market. Among such buying groups are Expert, EDA, and Euronics. Retail groups are represented by hypermarkets such as Carrefour and the Metromedia Group.

Submitted By: Yatendra Kumar MBA Finance & Marketing 3rd Semester UBS Chandigarh