Above: a photo of the marketing team, along with a few members of the purchasing department, at an inter-company football tournament
“In 1994, I managed to secure another, very important victory. After endless discussions with our father about the need to set up a marketing department, I finally managed to convince him (…). My father’s decision was ratified on 13 October. I was put in charge of marketing and communications. My sister Violetta would be working alongside me; she was appointed head of the communications department, with the task of coordinating the promotion of our products and the company’s image. For us – brother and sister who had grown up together without a mother from the very earliest years of our lives, from the courtyard of our home in Albiate to boarding school in Switzerland – one of the happiest periods of our lives began, because together we would achieve results capable of changing our father’s company forever. Up until that point, at Esselunga, what little marketing there had been had been handled by Bernardo, alongside trusted colleagues such as Ferdinando Schiavoni and Paolo De Gennis, following the approach of Rockefeller’s men. In Tuscany, he gave Giovanni Maggioni free rein – as he had more talent in this field than the others – and forced his hand regarding the Florentine superstore on Via di Novoli and the group’s first shopping centre, in Marlia in the province of Lucca, which Bernardo had initially been reluctant to pursue.
In our father’s way of thinking, after all, what need is there for a marketing department when all he has to do is issue the odd directive to his staff? Bernardo does not see all the day-to-day operational work; he has never managed promotions, designed leaflets, planned the layout of the spaces, and so on. His company was much simpler than the one we found ourselves running, because in the meantime the floor space had increased, the range of products had almost quadrupled, and methods had changed profoundly. When I returned from Chicago and began my experiments, working closely with Maggioni in Florence, our father didn’t realise the sheer amount of effort behind the results we were achieving. It was a completely new line of work, one that was gaining a foothold but which needed to be applied more widely and to be structured. Bernardo was used to a much smaller business than the one Esselunga was becoming, with a direct chain of command. Expansion beyond Lombardy and Tuscany, the development of superstores and the explosion in the number of items we find ourselves managing have led to the introduction of a range of functions and departments that did not even exist before, from logistics to purchasing, from sales to the development of operational systems. He often objects to this expansion of the workforce, which goes against his habit of relying on a small number of loyal staff, but which becomes necessary in a group where the number of employees is growing at a dizzying pace, as we open new stores and create new departments. So we finally managed to set up the marketing department, into which we merged the promotions department and the in-house graphics team – leaflets, the management of promotional contributions, market research, signage, labels, private-label packaging and so on – as well as the management of in-store space, including all cost accounting and the collection of external data on market trends. The latter is a key step towards data sharing, which will enable us, for the first time, to determine our market shares across different regions and for various products. (…). (pp. 165–166).
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Below:
1. Christmas with the Marketing Department, 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 formed the nucleus of the Marketing Department, established in 1994.
2. With Mr Santino “Aldo” Ferraro at the opening of the Bologna San Vitale Superstore, 1998. Ferraro was a mainstay of the Purchasing department and, from 1994, of Marketing.
3. Dario Bassetti, Director of Marketing and Communications at Esselunga
4. With Dr Fausto Tarditi when he and his colleagues from the Purchasing department pictured here were appointed managers in 1998
5. Number 7
6. With some colleagues
