New Marketing Organization Capabilities and Structure: Analytics, Experiences, Content, Engagement

Majority of marketing organizations are still living in the 1980’s

I was so pleased to read the Harvard Business Review article ”The ultimate marketing machine” (July-August 2014 issue). This reflected very much speeches that I have given in seminars about the dramatic change of marketing capabilities. Modern marketing requires analytics, ”technical” and service design capabilities. Marketing department should not just be able to create a brochure, but content that adds value to the readers. This article really enforced my thinking and created nice framework around the new marketing capabilities.

Information to the study was collected through over 10,000 marketing executives. This makes the study one of the most comprehensive studies around how marketing should be organised and what are capabilities required to run a modern marketing.

Below is a adaption the article. Harvard Business Review July – August 2014. The ultimate marketing machine. Based on TheMarketing2000 study.

1. Big data: Customer insight
2. Strategy: Assigned with corporate and sales strategy. Clear positioning.
3. Customer experience: Create and co-ordinate cross functionally
4. Employees: Inspire and move masses
5. Organization:
   1. Specialization: Center of excellence
   2. Cross functional collaboration
   3. Agility
6. Team:
   1. Think – Analytical
   2. Feel – Usability, customer service, engagement
   3. Do – Content, digital execution
7. Training: Systematic and tailored for business needs

The top performing marketing organizations have gone through tremendous change. High performers are able to leverage customer insight (big data), have clear positioning and align marketing with the corporate strategy.

They are able to create experiences and campaigns that get all employees engaged and exited. Those marketing organizations orchestrate customer experiences cross-functionally like customer services.

The best marketing organizations are more specialized and posses strong capabilities around analytics and digital marketing. The best organisations organize around ”Centers of Excellence” rather than spreading all the marketing organisation across geographical areas or divisions. I think this is especially important based on my own experience of heading digital marketing in a steel company. Through centralization we have been able to increase the amount of web leads for 20 leads in 2010 to around 10,000 leads in four years time. Without the ”Center of Excellence” this would not been possible.

Adapted from Harvard Business Review July-August 2014. Modern Marketing Organization capabilities

There is of course need to have basic and more as traditional marketing capabilities in place such as branding, event organisations, production of collateral and sales presentations. However, even that can be mostly outsources to advertising agencies.