Who Owns Granularity? Brand Data, Decision Rights, and Interdepartmental Conflict in Multinational Consumer Goods Firms

In multinational fast-moving consumer goods firms, marketing, legal and IT depend on the same brand data but need it at different levels of detail. Marketing needs it by variant and territory to measure campaign returns; legal to prove valid territorial licensing; IT prefers aggregation to cut cost. No framework names an owner, so IT decides by default, on an objective that excludes the costs it imposes. We model the conflict as a non-cooperative game grounded in property rights and transaction cost economics, show that aggregation is strictly dominant, and explain why negotiation fails: the decisions are frequent and individually small, their value is privately known, and their cost is realised quarters later. A Monte Carlo simulation of 100,000 paired iterations, calibrated on public benchmarks and a listed multinational’s accounts, evaluates two archetypes differing 90-fold in size. Under the assumed parameters, reassigning the decision is worth about half a percent of sales almost regardless of size, of which 91–93 percent comes from restoring lost detail. Centralised governance outperforms negotiation, chargeback and veto rights, and that ordering survives removing the assumed revenue response to detail, which the magnitudes do not. We also supply a protocol for measuring detail already lost.