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MARCH
2017

IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Marketing Has Changed: Its Time to Rebuild and Realign Your Marketing Department, Too
By Bhuvan Thaker, Marketing and Business Consultant

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Sadly, marketing organizations today are not organized as e ciently as they could be. They are continuing under legacy structures, which I nd to be irrelevant in
todays fast-paced digital era. However, there is a new approach that structures a companys marketing department around corporate goals rather than functional
responsibilities.

Micro-Management by Macro Minds

Functional organizations are heavily dependent on senior executives to correctly interpret mass data. Sta merely performs their functions, and all deliverables
are pushed upward for executive collation and strategic review. Those executives formulate new directives, which are pushed down to sta in the form of new
tasks.

Without clear and constant communication of the strategy by the executives, sta members are prone to seeing only their tasks and not how any task contributes
to the overarching strategy. Worse, their ideas regarding the strategy lack a clear pipeline back to the executive and to each other. While innovation can certainly
germinate from a single thought, its less likely to happen in this way. Rapid innovation requires a multitude of diverse thoughts bouncing o each other in close
proximity until a bright idea comes to fruition.
Organizing for the Flow of Ideas, Not the Performance of Tasks

Marketing organizations should try to structure around shared goals and the companys strategic initiatives so that team members see themselves as an integral
part of the overall strategy rather than as a hired hand with an assigned deliverable. The 3P marketing framework identi es the high-level goals of corporate
marketing as the acquisition, retention and development of customers, and it assigns team members to each of those initiatives in what I refer to as the three
pillar marketing structure. (http://visual.ly/3-pillars-marketing)

Unlike the structures of traditional marketing organizations that place employees under functional groupssuch as marketing, digital marketing and advertising
in the 3P marketing structure, all team members understand their roles within the overarching corporate strategy and realize that their responsibility is to
achieve a speci c corporate goal of that strategy. Having a greater purpose inspires deeper thoughts, and team members become encouraged to share their
ideas for better achieving the shared goal with other team members. While their assigned task may be to create a marketing campaign, for example, they are
inspired to contemplate how that campaign will drive the larger goal.

In the traditional structure, each sta member is focused on an individual task, such as creating a marketing program, drafting a corporate communication or
designing an advertising campaign. If any innovative ideas are shared, they likely pertain to how such a task could be better performed and dont bounce past
groups of people who perform similar tasks. With this new structure, each of those individual roles are infused into one in a manner that fosters teamwork, and
the end result is a competitive work force that features an array of skills and talents.

The 3P Marketing Structure

The 3P marketing organizational structure (http://visual.ly/3-pillars-marketing) de nes each pillars responsibility and breaks out marketing functions within each
pillar.

Acquisition: This team executes the strategy to acquire new customers. It might include sta previously assigned to perform tasks associated with inside sales,
digital marketing and advertising (including search engine marketing and optimization, print and online advertising, email marketing, event marketing, and
partner programs). Its success is measured based on customer lifetime value and value per customer.

Retention: Building an ongoing relationship with customers is this teams goal. Included in that goal is the identi cation and elimination of unpro table
customers. Required skill sets and teams include user experience design, customer service and support, customer insights, and product design and packaging.
Team members are focused on how to maintain revenue from existing stores/customers, and the measure of success is based on an increased customer
retention rate.

Development: Expanding client relationships is the goal of this team. Additional revenue can come from migrating horizontally from the client organization to
additional departments and subsidiaries and/or migration of the client horizontally across the companys products and services, including new products. Team
members should have the skills to gather and analyze customer insight, maintain the customer relationship, and design/stage events and promotions. Results are
measured by revenue retention, customer referrals and data that measures the size and companys share of customer wallets.

Innovation Will Be the Reward

By organizing the marketing team around strategic objectives and encouraging the teams higher-level discourse around those objectives, innovation is jump-
started and enabled to snowball into bigger and better ideas occurring sooner and more often. In todays fast-paced markets, companies cant a ord to ignore
any source for new and better ideas, especially those of its own employees. Limiting their imaginations or con ning them to functional echo chambers is a recipe
for slow growth.

MARKETING