I recently ran crosswise an first-class clause in "scheme+business" (an online and hard copy magazine devoted to scheme issues) that shed some stimulating light on a very important marketing issue.
The clause, entitled "Six Types of Marketing Organizations: Where Do You Fit In", is supported a study by Booz Allen Hamilton and the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) that acknowledged six basic types of "marketing organizations" inside companies. I found it to be a fascinating and perceptive look at the grandness of making sure the marketing function aligns with what the business really inevitably.
According to the clause, the six types of marketing "organizations" (i.e. the marketing people, systems and processes inside a business and the activities they perform) are as follows:
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1. Growth Champion. Marketing drives scheme at the senior level and plays a major role in generating revenue and leading new product and business development.
2. Senior Counselor. Although still functioning at the strategic level, marketing serves as more of an advisor to the CEO than a formulator of company-wide scheme.
3. Brand Foreman. Functioning in a more of military science role, marketing focuses on providing various services to support the company's brands. This can admit developing communication hypothesis strategies and creative initiatives, likewise as campaign execution.
4. Growth Facilitator. Similar to the growth champion, except here marketing in the main supports other major functions rather than initiating and leading scheme on its own.
5. Best Practices Advisor. Marketing serves as more of a military science weapon whose primary purpose is to help each business unit accomplish maximum effectiveness in their marketing efforts.
6. Service Provider. Marketing acts much like an outside vendor, providing advertising, promotions, PR and other marketing services to the company's business units and product teams as needed.
The danger, warns the clause, is that most marketing organizations believe they cover all these functions, when as a matter of fact they actually perform only one. As a result, there is often a major disconnect between what the business inevitably from the marketing function and what it actually gets.
The key to resolution this quandary lies in responsive three critical questions:
1. What type of marketing organization presently exists in your company?
2. What type of marketing organization inevitably to exist in your company (supported your strategic goals, value proposition and the future direction of your business)?
3. How do you properly align the marketing team so that #1 and #2 are the same?
A Simple Test
What I really likable about the clause was that it admitd a link to the Booz Allen/ANA Marketing Profiler, a short questionnaire that identifies your marketing organization's current visibility and offers recommendations for your moving your marketing organization closer to where it inevitably to be. In addition, the visibilityr offers resources and readings (based upon your visibility) to help formulate the proper scheme for this "migration path."
I took the visibilityr for Townsend, Inc., and found it to be quite accurate (we came out as "Growth Champions") in its assessment of our current marketing function. More important, the recommendations offered to improve our marketing organization were dead on. They helped focus my thinking in several important areas and reinforced few initiatives we have recently begun. For example:
* Recommendation: Develop prosody and decision tools (such as marketing ROI) to measure the performance of individual products, channels and segments.
* Lesson learned: At Townsend, we need to do a better job of measure our marketing ROI. We have already started down that road by shifting primarily to direct marketing and Internet marketing, which should make it easier for us to track and measure results.
* Recommendation: Don't keep all decision-making authority at the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) level. Instead, apportion these "decision rights" to appropriate levels of the organization to ensure accurate, rapid and continuous responses to service requests
* Lesson learned: This was a good monitor that we need to get our internal teams more involved in the marketing process so they can help select where we prospect and ensure that we generate the right kinds of clients for Townsend.
* Recommendation: Make sure your capabilities are properly aligned with both the marketing agenda and the CEO's priorities. Understand exactly what skills are required in individual areas.
* Lesson learned: If we're going to market through the Internet, we need to build internal Web-based marketing skills as quickly as possible.
* Recommendation: Involve other structure areas (operations, product development, finance, sales) early in the process of making marketing investments
* Lesson learned: Again, a good monitor to get our internal teams more involved in how we market as an organization.
The Rise of Samsung
It power be easy to dismiss this rather assessment as an stimulating but not especially valuable exercise. Before doing so, however, consider what assessing their marketing organization did for Samsung.
According to the "scheme+business" clause, Eric Kim took over as V.P. of global marketing for Samsung in 1999, even as the company embarked on a new scheme to go from "a low-cost manufacturer of electronics, sold primarily under the brand name career of its OEM customers, to a manufacturer of high-end digital products." This diagrammatic a huge and very difficult shift for the company, one that could lead to failure on a massive scale if all the proper elements were not in place.
Upon analyzing the skills, structure and core competencies of his marketing organization, Kim quickly completed they did not align with the new direction. He then spent five years reworking Samsung's entire marketing organization so that it more closely matched the firm's recently acknowledged inevitably.
The result?
Last year, Samsung became the world's 21st most valuable brand (according to the Business Week/Interbrand 2004 rankings), only one spot behind the vaunted Japanese electronics giant, Sony. While many factors contributed to this meteoric rise, developing the right rather marketing organization clearly played a major role in elevating Samsung to its current position as one of the world's elite brands.
So -- what rather marketing organization do you have? And more important, does it deliver what your organization inevitably?
To find out, take the Booz Allen/ANA Marketing Profiler. I also recommend reading the clause to get a full understanding of the concepts involved. You may discover that you're marketing organization is right track with where it inevitably to be. Or you may find out that you're trying to pound a round peg into a square hole.
Either way, my guess is you'll find it time well spent.
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