All too frequently, marketers' responses to proliferation undermine consistency, coordination, insight, and decision making. New brand, channel, and segment groups focus on increasingly disparate parts of the market and are often poorly integrated with the rest of the sales and marketing organization. Also, they give rise to unintended consequences, such as channel conflict, rising marketing costs, convoluted IT systems and other kinds of process infrastructure, and an inability to allocate marketing dollars consistently to the most valuable opportunities.

To understand these dynamics, consider the experience of a global beverage company dealing with three aspects of proliferation: the growth of the premium and economy segments at the expense of middle-of-the-road ones (the company's traditional focus), the increased importance of discount channels, and media proliferation. The company's responses—new brands, a variety of different segmentation strategies, and an increased emphasis on selling to discount retailers—added several layers of complexity to its marketing efforts.

As a result, the company's marketers had increasing difficulty identifying and pursuing opportunities in a coherent way, assigning accountability, and tracking performance. At the same time that brand managers in one region were investing in marketing communications to position a brand as a premium one, for example, the sales organization...