Marketing2020 started from an observation about mismatch. What the marketing function does is changing rapidly, but how it is organized has largely stayed the same, and marketing leaders were asking how to ready their organization for growth in a fast-changing environment.
The evidence base is more than 250 CMO and peer interviews together with a quantitative survey of more than 10,000 participants in 92 countries.
Key findings
- Overperformers and underperformers were separated by revenue growth relative to competitors, and the classification was confirmed by an analysis using publicly available growth data.
- On data, the edge is in extraction rather than volume. Overperformers are ahead by 13 points on expecting a high impact from big data, 7 points on having the right data available, and 9 points on being able to use it to improve marketing effectiveness.
- On purpose, the gaps are far larger. Marketers agree by 62 points that brands with a clear societal purpose drive business growth, by 48 points on higher margin, and by 30 points on higher price.
- On internal engagement, overperformers lead by 17 points on ensuring all employees are fully engaged with the brand purpose, and their people are more likely to be proud of it and to talk about it outside work.
- On training, overperformers lead by 19 points on tailoring programs to the specific needs of the business, and their employees receive on average 20 percent more training days.
The what: three drivers of a winning brand
The brand side of the framework has three parts: identifying relevant big insights, establishing a clear and engaging purposeful positioning, and creating value through a consistent and engaging total experience.
The insight point is made bluntly in a quote from a roundtable, comparing big data to sex in high school: everybody talks about it and almost nobody does it well.
Total experience is described as a combination of breadth and depth: a personalized and social experience across a multitude of touchpoints in consumers’ daily lives, with inconsistency and breaches of privacy as the failure modes.
The how: five organizational drivers
The organizational side has five drivers: connecting with other functions, inspiring employees with the brand purpose, focusing effort on key strategies and KPIs, organizing efficient processes, and building marketing excellence.
Connecting is about business acumen used as a ticket to influence. Successful marketing leaders link their KPIs to business growth and translate marketing terms into the language of the business, and growth is the top KPI among overperformers.
Inspiring means giving internal engagement the same priority as external engagement, which enables decisions to be delegated and keeps the customer experience seamless.
Focusing means co-creating the strategy first and then embedding it, and tracking the KPIs for marketing impact, business growth and personal performance. The point is made with an image about checking your route from New York to Chicago more often than once a year.
Organizing means breaking down silos so that marketing works closely with IT, HR and finance, where overperformers lead by 11, 12 and 10 points.
The organizing section also identifies three types of marketer: think marketers with strong analytical capabilities, feel marketers focused on consumer engagement, and do marketers specialized in content development and production.
Building means capability. The capabilities most correlated with growth are consumer understanding and insights, brand positioning, and brand strategy.
What was keeping CMOs awake
The interviews collected both opportunities and challenges. The opportunities named are direct collaboration with consumers, social marketing, globalizing markets, purposeful marketing, and influencing the business directly.
The challenges are information overload, difficulty initiating internal change, delivering more with less, privacy risks and consumer backlash, maintaining touchpoint consistency, and organizational silos.
What the partners offered next
Two benchmarking services are described. The qualitative version is up to five confidential team interviews benchmarked against the study’s success factors, followed by a half-day workshop.
The quantitative version surveys the client’s own marketing organization, benchmarks it, and produces analysis and recommendations before the same kind of workshop.
A peer network was also being set up from 2014 for senior marketers managing global or very large national and regional brands, giving members access to content and to peers with similar challenges.
Scope and limitations
This is a marketing brochure for the study and its associated consulting services, produced by the firms that ran it, so the findings are presented alongside the offer built on them.
Source
This page summarises Future-Proofing the Marketing Organisation, by EffectiveBrands, ISBA, SpencerStuart, 2013.