Marketing organisations should be changing faster than marketing.

As an ex-marketer turned management consultant, I was obviously honoured to address the welcome Gala of the Global Marketer Week’22 organised by the World Federation of Advertisers. For those not familiar, this is an event that, along with Cannes Lions, is the instance where you can find the most Global CMOs gathered in one room.

At REBORRN, we have been working with Global Marketers, helping them change their organisations, and one common pattern that we see again and again is that while the Marketing industry is great at observing and acting on how others change (consumers), the Marketing Organisation has not changed much in the past couple of decades, apart from learning some new skills.

Yes, many things changed in the “WHAT”, introducing new roles and learning new skills, but we didn’t see a significant change in “HOW”, the operating model of a marketing organisation.

So this was the key thematic of my Keynote, and here are the five — somewhat provocative- questions I used to kick off a discussion not on the future of Marketing but, for once, on the future of Marketing Organisations.

Question #1 How is the marketing function changing, and what is their role in the new organisation?

If we see the companies of the Future, from start-ups to IPOed scale-ups like Uber and Netflix, the marketing department is gradually transforming into two new entities.

The first one is Growth which is basically the old sales department combined with performance marketing, data analytics and CRM. The second one is Brand which is the voice of the organisation towards Consumers, Employees, Society and Key stakeholders. It brings Corporate affairs, Employer Branding, and ESG under the same roof because that’s what makes sense.

This is obviously more evident in Tech companies where demand generation and demand fulfilment are happening on the same (Digital) channels, but one can see aspects of the above happening in more organisations as well, like bringing Consumer, shareholder, employee storytelling under one roof.

I’m curious to listen in the comments; what else do you see on that front.

Question #2: How should the traditional Org Chart of a marketing organisation evolve to accommodate today’s realities?

Many organisations and agencies alike move from skill-based structures to cross-functional teams. A typical structure of a multi-market marketing organisation would be Research, Content, Media, and Technology, built centrally and usually siloed, working independently as centres of excellence with each market, that is also following a skill-based structure.

In the past 4 to 5 years, we have been looking at a slow but steady transition from these transaction-based or skill-based structured to cross-functional teams that are organised around one product or category of products, one need state or a specific consumer segment.

Finally, we are excited to see the definition of what really is a Global/central team versus a local team is getting increasingly blurry, and this is mainly a positive outcome of the pandemic.

Before covid, central teams consisted of people working at the headquarters or the organisation’s Hubs, usually the United Kingdom, Switzerland, New York or somewhere on the west coast, Singapore or Shanghai, you name it.

Remote working helped us realise the concept of Dynamic Resource Allocation, enabling the rise of truly networked organisations and having people from different time zones working on a global initiative/project from their home offices.

What else do you see?

Question #3 How does a marketer’s role evolve?

On the one hand, we see a huge shift of taking things that were until recently outsourced in-house. We now see that a marketing organisation now consists of Performance Marketers, Data Scientists, eCommerce experts, CRM Experts, Content Creators, and more. Marketing organisations are gradually becoming a colourful mosaic of people coming from different backgrounds.

It was less than a decade ago when marketing mostly consisted of Marketers whose role was to co-ordinating external suppliers, brief agencies, and sometimes lead strategy.

On the other hand, with the help of technology and AI, the new marketer is now skilled with superpowers that a few years ago were unimaginable. 5 years ago, to launch a website, one would need an army of experts, thousands of dollars and months. Today it is a matter of days and a tiny team’s work with the help of tools like webflow. And you can see that same pattern in almost any field of a marketer’s work. Look at Segment for CRM, Pollfish for Research, and Snowflake for data management, to name a few. There’s a new generation of tools that are literally enabling one individual to achieve what large teams of experts would a few years back.

Question #4: How do we change the way we do things in marketing?

Agile frameworks, which started from engineering teams a couple of decades, are now taking by storm marketing organisations. More and more organisations are moving from a waterfall approach of doing things, delivering big chunks of work, with high uncertainty and long timelines, to Agile ways of working that ensure:

• Validated learnings over opinions & conventions
• Customer-focused collaboration over silos and Hierarchy
• Iterative Approach to campaigning over Huge Launches
• Autonomy and Results over Process and Control
• Flexible over Rigid Planning
• Responding to Change over Following a plan
• Small Experiments over Huge bets.

It took The Coca-Cola Company less than a week from “idea to launch” the pilot of a new business in Austria. Have a look at the case study here.

Questions #5: How does the Client Agency relationship evolve?

We see a huge change in the outcomes when we move from endless rounds of briefing and de-briefing partners to co-creation models. Using Design Thinking and Design Sprint Methodology to co-create ideas and plans.

It’s hard to swallow for both sides, but what if marketers and creative teams are locked in a (virtual or physical) room working as one team to produce the next big idea or the next comms plan in days instead of months or weeks?

Well, this is already happening, and we have specific cases of organisations having Design Thinking Capabilities as a mandatory for their roster agencies.

Both Marketers and Agencies need to adapt to new ways of working that embrace co-creation and break the Client — Agency relationship stereotypes. We’ve seen teams changing their way of working and getting work of months done within weeks.

Let me know in the comments what kind of change you see happening in your organisations. 👇