Reinventing The Marketing Organization

Late last week, I published my biggest piece of research yet at Forrester, called "Reinventing The Marketing Organization."  I posted about it on our official marketing team blog and have been getting some great feedback.  If you're not a Forrester client, you can visit the landing page for an excerpt from the report that will give you a good idea of its content and structure.

Unfortunately this isn't PGM (i.e. Pete Generated Media), so I can't give it away for free - but if there are particular points you're interested in discussing from the summary or otherwise, feel free to comment or drop me a line!

Comments

[Suzanne Lowe]

Hi Pete:

Fascinating stuff. Did your research include any professional service firms (accounting, law, architecture, management consulting, engineering, etc.)?

[Peter Kim]

Hi Suzanne,

Our survey set was restricted to client-side marketers, i.e. consultants and other types of marketing services agencies were excluded. Not that we were disinterested in the marketing of professional services, but we wanted to ensure feedback from first-hand sources.

That being said, I noticed a definite trend in organizational focus and customer-centricity. Companies with a product focus, e.g. manufacturing, were farthest away. Service-oriented companies, e.g. travel, were closer. The next arena of competition is clearly experience - that's where a lot of focus lies today. Beyond that, Dr. Barbara Kahn at Wharton suggests that the next stage is transformation - actually becoming changed as a result of associating with the brand.

[Suzanne Lowe]

Greetings again Peter:

Thanks for your response. I may not have been clear: What service-oriented sectors did your research include (in addition to travel)? I write on behalf of professional service firms (those businesses that sell their intellectual capital like law firms and accounting firms). The CMOs of these sectors are hungry for data about marketing performance, and even though collectively their companies are responsible for about $3 trillion in revenues generated throughout the global economy, too often their sectors are overlooked.

[Peter Kim]

Survey respondents could choose Business Services as an industry option and drill down further according to type. The recommendations from the research apply regardless of industry - but some companies and sectors will have an easier time reinventing themselves than others.

[Tom Abshire]

Hello Peter,

I’ve just read your report “Reinventing the Marketing Organization” and the call for companies to create customer-centric marketing organizations. While I heartily agree with your premise and direction you have outlined, my professional experience and our recent research leads me to believe that we have traditionally given the processes and best practices of truly understanding the customers too little attention. While we have been encouraged to ‘focus on the customer’ for years, most companies and their marketing staffs lack a clear understanding of how to do this work. In fact, in recent conversations I have had with several of the leading product marketing and product management training organizations, to a person, they said most product managers do not possess these skills.

With collaborative technologies and better access to customers, developing deep insights is no longer has to be a costly, time consuming project. Now companies can more easily manage their own processes to better understand customers through directed activities and monitoring the dynamics of employee-to-customer and customer-to-customer interactions. Further, these collaborative technologies open up the research process to better align those responsible for the customer strategy, experience management and the supporting infrastructure, which I believe can improve execution across the value delivery chain.