The authors argue that what marketers do has changed almost beyond recognition, while in most companies the organizational structure of the function has not changed since brand management emerged more than 40 years ago.
CMOs are tearing up their org charts and asking what the ideal structure looks like. The article’s answer is that this is the wrong question, because a simple blueprint does not exist. The right question is about purpose, capabilities and the structures needed to support them, since structure must follow strategy.
Key findings
- The research base is the Marketing2020 study, run by EffectiveBrands with the ANA, the WFA, Spencer Stuart, Forbes, MetrixLab and Adobe. It included qualitative interviews with more than 350 CEOs, CMOs and agency heads, over a dozen CMO roundtables, and online surveys of more than 10,000 marketers in 92 countries.
- Respondents were split into over-performers and under-performers on the basis of three-year revenue growth relative to competitors, and their strategies, structures and capabilities were compared.
- The first shared trait is turning data into insight. Knowing what a consumer is doing where and when is table stakes. High performers integrate that with knowledge of why, drawing on basic drives the authors call universal human truths.
- The second is purposeful positioning, meaning brands that deliver functional, emotional and societal benefits at once.
- The third is total experience. Some companies deepen the relationship through personalization and others broaden it by adding touchpoints. High-performing brands do both.
Purpose that reorganized a company
The worked example is AkzoNobel’s Dulux. In 2006 the business was heavily decentralized, with each local market setting its own goals and mix, and the result was inconsistent positioning and results.
In 2008 a new global brand team studied how people perceived the brand across markets and what makes them color their environments. One theme held from China to India to the UK to Brazil: the colors around us powerfully influence how we feel. Dulux was not selling cans of paint, it was selling tins of optimism.
That definition produced the Let’s Color campaign, which enlists volunteers, now more than 80 percent of AkzoNobel employees, and donates paint to revitalize run-down urban neighborhoods. It aligned the once-decentralized marketing organization and expanded share in many markets.
Five drivers of organizational effectiveness
Leaders of high-performing companies connect marketing to the business strategy and the rest of the organization, inspire by engaging all levels with the brand purpose, focus teams on a few priorities, organize agile cross-functional teams, and build internal capability.
Connecting means more than aligning with strategy handed down. High-performing marketing leaders actively engage in creating that strategy, and between 2006 and 2013 marketing’s influence on strategy development rose by 20 percentage points.
One structural way to connect is to put marketing and another function under one leader. Motorola’s Eduardo Conrado led marketing and IT, Antonio Lucio was asked to lead HR as well as marketing at Visa, and Keith Weed led communications and sustainability alongside marketing at Unilever.
Inspiring is called one of the most underused drivers. When employees are motivated by a respected brand purpose, everyone in the company becomes a de facto member of the marketing team. Some companies measure it: Unilever tracks employee brand engagement as a KPI, Google measures Googliness in appraisals, and Zappos offers new hires $3,000 to leave after four weeks.
Focusing addresses misalignment. Asked for their top five marketing objectives, eight global executives in one company produced only two shared goals. Over-performers agree far more strongly that local marketing understands the global strategy and that global marketing understands local reality.
The authors flag an irony: almost all companies plan consumer communication campaigns meticulously and fail to give internal communication about strategy the same care.
The networked organization
Speed is now structural. Oreo’s Super Bowl blackout tweet was designed and approved in minutes because the team had been deliberately organized in a mission control room and authorized to engage in real time.
Rigid matrixed structures are giving way to networked organizations with flexible roles, fluid responsibilities and faster sign-off, letting leaders assemble teams for specific initiatives that may form, execute and disband within weeks or months.
Roles are categorized not by title but by type. Think marketers apply analytic capability to data mining, media-mix modeling and ROI optimization. Do marketers develop content and lead production. Feel marketers focus on consumer interaction and engagement.
Senior marketers operate as orchestrators, briefing cross-functional teams, making sure they have capability and resources, and tracking performance, drawing talent from marketing, other functions, agencies and consultancies. Unilever’s Project Sunlight team drew from seven expertise areas.
The model only works where central leadership trusts local teams to understand the strategy and collaborate on it. The authors quote Jeff Bezos: we are stubborn on vision, we are flexible on details.
Capability, and the gap that remains
The training difference is large in both quantity and quality. Under-performers give employees just over half a day of training a year, while over-performers give nearly two full days of tailored, practical training by external experts.
The best organizations, including Coca-Cola, Unilever and Shiseido, run dedicated internal marketing academies to create a single marketing language. Senior leaders benefit most from digital training, and companies including Unilever and Diageo have taken them to Facebook, alongside reverse mentoring that pairs senior managers with younger staff.
The finding the authors call striking is that most organizations have not put all the pieces together. Only half of even high-performing organizations excel on some of these capabilities, which they present as a map of where the work is rather than a discouragement.
Scope and limitations
The document is a working draft of the article, carrying its working headline and deck. The performance split is based on self-reported three-year revenue growth relative to competitors.
Source
This page summarises The Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, Keith Weed, 2014.