The last several years have unleashed a wave of marketing change. Changes in media and technology have upended how consumers discover and engage with companies, and new technologies such as generative AI have brought unrelenting changes to how marketing gets done. Our latest research, Build Your Best Marketing Organization, lays out five steps for marketing leaders to build a function that addresses these changes head on and creates value through marketing for the entire organization.
Here are the five steps on the journey to building the best marketing organization:
- Establish your space. The first step in this process places marketing within the context of the overall enterprise. Here, you’ll establish guardrails that avert organization design failure from misconstrued expectations at the outset.
- Set a North Star. Your marketing function’s North Star points you in the right direction. We use this metaphor to discuss the most common outcomes that constitute the five points of this star.
- Design a flexible structure. Much emphasis is misplaced on the boxes and lines of organization structures. Instead, approach your structure as a wireframe on which to build your organization. We provide common models to help you get started, but it’s important to be flexible.
- Mobilize across teams. Marketing practices sit atop organization structures and determine how marketing actually works — across specialties and functions. In this step, you’ll create the most potent practices to maximize marketing’s contribution to the business.
- Select complementary partners. There’s no need to do it all yourself. Secure the services of trusted partners to help you on an ongoing basis or to opportunistically inject doses of specialized expertise as needed.
Forrester clients can explore these five steps in detail in the report, Build Your Best Marketing Organization.
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