Marketing and HR have to talk

On CNBC-Tv18 one of my favourite programs is Storyboard. A week ago they ran a special episode anchored by Nokia India's head honcho Shivakumar.

The theme for the episode was advertising and branding of pure services businesses. They did a feature on airlines and showcased Kingfisher Airlines as a case study and also looked at a pure consulting business and talked to a Partner at Bain & Co, in India.

The learning was that services businesses are people related. Their behavior and skills is the actual product that the client/buyer is paying for. And then reporter said one thing "Marketing has to get off its ivory tower and talk to HR to actually build the brand in reality"

That's so true.

If your brand promise is something else and your recruiters and HR generalist select and measure people against other standards, you're setting up your services organization for a failure in front of your customers.

Is your a services organization? How much does Marketing and Branding work along with HR?