Above: a photo of the marketing team, with a few elements of the purchases, at an inter-company football tournament
“In 1994 I managed to bring home another very important victory. After endless discussions with our father about the need to set up a marketing office, I finally managed to convince him (…). My father’s decision is ratified on 13 October. I am put in charge of marketing and communication. Working with me will be my sister Violetta, who is appointed head of the communications office, with the task of coordinating the promotion of the company’s products and image. For us, brother and sister who had grown up together without a mother from the earliest years, from the courtyard of the house in Albiate to boarding school in Switzerland, one of the happiest phases opens, because together we will be able to achieve results that will change our father’s company forever. Until then, in Esselunga, what little marketing Bernardo had done, together with trusted people like Ferdinando Schiavoni and Paolo De Gennis, following the approach of Rockefeller’s men. In Tuscany he left a free hand to Giovanni Maggioni, who is more talented in this field than the others and forced his hand on the Florentine superstore in Via di Novoli and on the group’s first shopping centre, in Marlia in the province of Lucca, which Bernardo did not want at first.
In our father’s mentality, on the other hand, what need is there for a marketing office when he only needs to give occasional directives to his men? Bernardo didn’t see all the operational work, he never managed promotions, designed flyers, planned space management and so on. His company was much simpler than the one in which we found ourselves operating, because in the meantime the surface areas had increased, the items in the assortment had almost quadrupled, the methods had changed profoundly. When I come back from Chicago and start my experiments, working closely with Maggioni in Florence, our father doesn’t realise how much effort there is behind the results we achieve. It is a totally new work, which is catching on but needs to find a wider application, to be structured. Bernardo is used to a much smaller company than Esselunga is becoming, with a direct chain of command. The expansion outside of Lombardy and Tuscany, the development of the superstores and the explosion in the number of items we are managing mean that we have to introduce a series of functions and offices that didn’t even exist before, from logistics to purchasing, from sales to the development of operating systems. He often questions this expansion of personnel, which goes against his habit of relying on a small number of loyalists, but which becomes necessary in a group that sees employees grow at a dizzying pace as we open new shops and create new functions. So we finally succeeded in setting up the marketing department, in which we bring together the promotions department and the in-house graphics department – the flyers, the management of promotional contributions, market surveys, signs, labels, private label packaging and so on – as well as the management of space in the shops, with all the industrial accounting and the acquisition of data from outside on market trends. The latter is a key step towards data sharing, which will allow us for the first time to find out what our market shares are in the different territories and products. (…). (pp. 165 – 166).
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1. Christmas with Marketing, 1995: From top to bottom Messrs Rossi, Pogliaghi, Brocchieri, Berselli, Giovanni Merante, Mario Barone and GC. Fausto Tarditi and Santino ‘Aldo’ Ferraro are missing. The Space Allocation Office was the embryo of the Marketing Office, founded in 1994.
2. With Santino ‘Aldo’ Ferraro at the opening of the Bologna San Vitale Superstore, 1998. Ferraro has been a pillar of Purchasing and, since 1994, of Marketing.
3. Dario Bassetti, Marketing and Communications Director of Esselunga 4. With Dr Fausto Tarditi when he and the Purchasing colleagues in the photo were appointed managers, 1998
