This short deck sets out the capabilities that a modern marketing function is expected to own outright or to partner on closely. It draws its capability list from three reference points: McKinsey’s modern marketing capabilities, the ANA’s 2023 work, and the DaVinci CMO profile.
Key findings
- Insight is treated as a capability rather than a service. It collects, synthesizes, and operationalizes customer, competitive, and market data so that strategy has something to sit on.
- Value and portfolio strategy is placed inside marketing’s remit, covering propositions, pricing, packaging, and go-to-market alignment with product.
- Creative is framed as a system, not a set of assets. The capability is on-brand creative, content at scale, and reusable creative systems.
- Demand work is described across the full funnel rather than at the top of it, spanning acquisition, consideration, conversion, and retention across paid, owned, and earned channels.
- Measurement is bundled with data and martech, so that ROI measurement, testing, personalization, and automation sit in one capability rather than several.
Each capability has a classic ancestor
The deck deliberately ties every modern capability back to established marketing theory. Insight is linked to segmentation, targeting and positioning, and to jobs-to-be-done. Value and portfolio strategy is linked to positioning and value proposition frameworks. Creative and content is linked to brand architecture and the messaging house.
The same holds further down the list. Full-funnel demand is tied to the marketing funnel, AIDA, and SOSTAC tactics. Customer experience is tied to journey mapping and customer lifetime value frameworks. Measurement is tied to attribution and econometric models and to marketing dashboards.
Experience as orchestration
Customer experience and personalization is defined as an orchestration job. The function is responsible for consistency across touchpoints and for building the journeys and retention programs that hold a customer relationship together over time.
What changes by 2030
The closing table contrasts what each capability had to learn in 2020 with what it will have to learn by 2030. For insight generation, the 2020 lesson was that it is fundamental to a real value proposition. The 2030 lesson is about AI working as an accelerator to generating insights.
Scope and limitations
The document is a working draft. The comparison table is filled in for insights generation only, and the strategy row is left as placeholder marks rather than content.
Source
This page summarises Marketing’s Areas of Expertise, by Institute for Real Growth, Said Business School, 2023.