The central claim is a mismatch. What marketing does has changed completely, and how marketing is organized has not.
The evidence comes from two hundred and fifty vision interviews with chief executives, chief marketing officers and agencies, plus 10,231 marketing participants from ninety-two countries. The study covers the role of marketing, its structure, its capability, and chief marketing officer leadership, all aimed at driving business growth.
Key findings
- Winning brands share three characteristics: big insights, purposeful positioning, and total experience.
- Purposeful positioning pays. Brands with a societal purpose outperform those without it across market share, lead generation, marketing efficiency, net promoter score, consumer engagement, revenue growth, marketing return on investment, and brand health.
- Capability has the strongest correlation to revenue growth, brand health and marketing return on investment, with the widest gaps in consumer understanding and insights, brand positioning, and brand strategy.
- Overperformers train more and train better. Forty-six percent receive more than three days of training a year against twenty-nine percent of the rest, and sixty percent rate their training program above six out of ten against forty-eight percent.
- Overperformers work far more closely with other functions. On always working closely with IT the split is thirty against fourteen, with human resources forty against eighteen, and with finance twenty-nine against twenty-six.
The forces behind the change
The opening names what has shifted around marketing: speed, transparency, a generation asking why, and non-governmental organizations as a new force.
The structure the study examines is not just the department. It covers global and local teams, agencies, partners, and consumers, which is a wider definition of marketing structure than an organization chart.
The listed opportunities are globalization, collaborating with consumers, social marketing, purposeful marketing, and the opportunity to influence the business. The listed challenges are information overload, touch point consistency, doing more with less, organizational silos, privacy risks, and staying current.
Big insights
The data question is not whether a company has analytics but whether it can use them. The study separates having the right data and analytics available to measure marketing effectiveness from being able to leverage all of it to improve effectiveness, and overperformers lead on both.
The organizational conclusion drawn is that marketing is too important to be left just to marketers, and the study tracks how far marketing sits inside business decisions. Between 2006 and 2013, marketing working closely with the chief executive on business strategy rose from thirty-three to fifty-eight percent, and marketing approving large growth-oriented investment decisions rose from nineteen to thirty-eight percent.
That influence is not evenly spread. Agreement that marketing works closely with the chief executive varies sharply across consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, energy and utilities, and health care.
Purposeful positioning
Purpose is broken into three layers of benefit: functional, emotional, and societal. The performance comparison is drawn on the societal layer.
Purpose only works if the organization believes it. Overperformers lead on being proud of the brand’s purpose, at eighty-four against seventy-two, on ensuring all employees are fully engaged with it, at sixty-three against forty-three, and on continuously engaging consumers and customers around it, at sixty against forty-seven.
The instruction that goes with it is to engineer less and engage more, and the internal engagement examples span offices from Sao Paulo and New York to Tokyo, Cape Town and Prague.
Total experience
The digital problem is framed as a trade-off between depth of personalization and breadth of touch points, with inconsistency and breach of privacy as the two ways it goes wrong.
The worked example maps a runner’s experience end to end, from the price of the shoe and heart rate monitoring through brand image and self-identification to motivation, music, social networks, and emotional association with running. It shows how little of the total experience the product itself accounts for.
Delivering that consistently requires one global strategy that people actually believe in, and support falls the further you get from the center. Agreement with supporting the global brand strategy runs above eighty percent globally, in the low seventies regionally, and in the fifties and sixties locally.
The structural answers are orchestration and integration, new marketing roles including a chief experience officer and combined marketing and technology leadership, and working with more outside partners. Fifty-three percent of overperformers work with more than five agencies against thirty-three percent of underperformers.
What it asks of the leader
The reframing offered is from digital marketing to marketing in a digital age, which moves the change from a channel question to an organizational one.
The closing priorities for the leader are five: lead by example in a digital world, engage the total organization, inspire and empower rather than control, ensure brand consistency throughout, and build marketing capability.
Scope and limitations
This is a summary presentation prepared for one company, not the full study. Most of the charts appear as bare numbers without their axis labels in the extracted text, and the comparisons between overperformers and the rest are drawn from self-reported survey answers.
Source
This page summarises Marketing 2020: Organizing for Growth – Liberty Mutual Summary, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2014.