Marketing Organization Overhaul

I believe 2007 is the year the CMO will make the reinvention of the marketing organization a top priority. It is my opinion that CMOs will push forcefully for a top-to-bottom reinvention of how to better conduct the “business of marketing.”

Sounds a little strange, right? As marketers, we spend so much time on positioning, agency relations, accountability, new media platforms, brand building – and, of course, the need to deliver short term results. But what often escapes our attention is having the right “marketing organization strategy.” How do we best leverage the assets of the marketing organization to accomplish the company’s goals?

So much of marketing’s success depends on the quality of people, the organizational structure, the integration of support functions (agencies and research) and the vision that is established by the marketing leadership function.

But how these elements all weave together in an integrated approach is a very complex and not well understood area. However increasingly, senior marketing leaders are beginning to appreciate the importance of these factors to the overhaul health and well being of the marketing function and the company.

So, where do we start? How about understanding what the CEO wants from marketing. Aligning with the CEO’s goals enables the CMO to evaluate the best type of marketing organization needed for success. In a groundbreaking study, the ANA and Booz Allen Hamilton identified different roles that marketing organizations can fulfill. A full description of each – as well as an online tool to help CMOs determine which one aligns with their unique circumstances – is available at marketingprofiler.com. But, in summary, the different roles that marketing organizations can play are:

• Growth Champions
• Consultants
• Brand builders
• Corporate priority managers
• Best practices advisors
• Service providers

Once a CMO identifies the precise role the marketing function should fulfill, he or she must then determine how to deliver the maximum value that role can possibly offer.  In this regard, the CMO must then address the structure of the marketing function.

• Is it centralized or decentralized?
• Who owns marketing strategy?
• At what levels are decisions made?
• How does work flow within the department and across the corporation?

There’s not a lot of guidance in marketing literature that would be “suggestive” of how marketing should be organized and managed. And candidly, that’s troubling. There are lots of philosophies, but little explicit advice on which approach works best. Net, in “designing” the right way to organize “people assets,” the CMO needs to give serious consideration to the structure of workflows and the “interconnectivity” of departments and corporate functions.

That leads to the “quality of people.” The CMO must continuously work to upgrade the skill sets to ensure that the continuously shifting marketing landscape doesn’t undercut people’s abilities to manage the various marketing functions.

A great example of marketing organization reinvention – with training as its centerpiece – has occurred at Campbell Soup Company. Paul Alexander, Vice President, Global Advertising, has committed upwards of 25% of his marketing leadership team’s time to staff training. And what does this huge commitment to professional development focus on? Here are a few of the themes:

• Principled risk-taking
• Effectively working with agencies as long-term partners
• Unrelenting focus on big ideas – nurturing great ideas about the brand benefit
• Exhibiting humility – not being afraid to make mistakes in bringing big ideas to life

People development is immensely important to reinventing the marketing organization. But how do you know what decisions to make? One thoughtful approach leverages a dashboard of key metrics to measure the progress of the function. A dashboard can highlight key information that can often escape the CMO. Many companies engage in a strategy mapping process with a precise understanding of the skills needed to achieve business objectives. They then engage a training organization – like the ANA – or a university to develop a curriculum to improve the desired skills, either broadly across the entire marketing organization, or narrowly with regard to specific pockets of expertise. Using the dashboard to monitor the desired levels of training, education, certification or skill proficiency is mission-critical and highly appropriate.

But beyond the new skills and processes that marketers must posses, there are some special traits that are essential for success. When I ask leaders in the marketing profession to describe the unique qualities that marketers of the future will need, they use terms like these:

• Holistic ‘system-thinkers’
• Customer-centric believers
• Innovators and dreamers
• Smart, effective communicators
• Results-obsessed managers
• Enlightened measurers
• Great team leaders.

Overhauling the Marketing Organization. This is certainly a messy business – no doubt about it.  However, if we learn how to do it right, marketing organization management will become one of the most important strategies for marketers as they pursue their ultimate goal: to improve the overall quality of marketing. And when we find consistent pathways for outstanding marketing quality, we will have institutionalized why the CMO can and should become the most important member of the C-suite.

 

Comments

[jschimel]

I really appreciated this post. I work at Stategic Communications Group, a PR and business development focused agency and we have been speaking to CMO's who echo similiar sentiments. Creating buy-in among the c-suite is a constant challenge. Here's a link to two videocasts with the CMOs of ManTech and iDirect discussing this very challenge.

http://www.gotostrategic.com/mediaLibrary/mediaLibrary.php