Marketing Governance

In times of crisis more then one company ceases the moment to reorganize. Sometimes because business goes bad and they just have to, sometimes because the market demands it, sometimes because management sees a good excuse to lose some weight. Most of the time it results in downsizing the workforce, but is that really necessary. Isn’t it better to improve efficiency so your people do more with the same energy, and thus results go up?

In this infographic Jive shows you what  an reorganisation costs.

Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity one can read that high-value MO goes beyond automation, measurement and administration to include higher value-add tools such as cross-functional collaboration, change management, metrics alignment, competency development, predictive analytics, and the like.

According to the survey, companies showed clear tendencies to extend the scope of MO. Thus, the scope of MO typically includes fundamental, expanded, and sophisticated elements:

• Fundamental MO Scope — Includes budget management, customer relationship management (CRM), vendor management, marketing outcomes measurement, and marketing services (e.g., bill of materials, licensing, pricing, creative, production management).
• Expanded MO Scope — Expands beyond the Fundamental MO Scope to comprise marketing campaign automation, process mapping and design, best practices and knowledge management, cross-functional and behavior-rewards alignment, marketing operations management (MOM), marketing resource management (MRM), digital asset management (DAM), and marketing process metrics.
• Sophisticated MO Scope — Evolves to higher sophistication than the Expanded MO Scope to include advanced processes (e.g., LEAN Enterprise, Six Sigma, and supply chain management), marketing governance, portfolio management, customer profitability, change management, competency development, shared vision and strategic management, enterprise marketing management, metrics alignment, and predictive analytics.

The graph shows the progression over time from Fundamental to Expanded to Sophisticated practices

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Recently one of our customers was completing their quarterly marketing report. She was frustrated because she was trying to complete nearly 500 input fields in her excel doc! Five hundred fields, yikes! Part of the reason she is collecting so many numbers is that the metrics for the marketing organization and the relationship between the various data elements are not clear. Selecting the right performance metrics and developing an actionable marketing dashboard is something many organizations are tackling. However, if the link between marketing activities and business results isn’t clear, you may find yourself wallowing in data.

For example, it’s important to be able to connect the dots between a marketing program and product trials with customer acquisition and market share. To do this will take three things: alignment, good data, and access to this data. As you grapple with measuring marketing, a key part of the work will be determining whether you have the data you need.

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Doremus optimism is rising among global executives around the world.

Across four key metrics—global economic conditions, local economic conditions, industry economic conditions, and corporate outlook—more senior-level executives project improvements over the next six months vs. the same period a year earlier some 41 percent are expecting global economic conditions to improve over the next six months, up from the 25% who did so a year earlier.  No more then 52 percent expect improvements in their own businesses over the next six months, up from the 39% who did so in 2011.

The outlook differs by geography: North Americans were the most optimistic overall, particularly about economic conditions locally and within their own industries. By contrast, Europeans were the most pessimistic, particularly regarding local economic conditions.

For the first time in nine years, senior execs ranked improving market share/competitive position (47%) as their top goal for the year. That shift pushed cost cutting into the No. 2 spot (43%), while developing/marketing new products/services (39%) ranked No. 3

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So youre in marketing. And you just launched an important campaign. Everything is perfect. From start to beginning. Success is guaranteed, because you thought of everything. You hired the best of the best to think it all through and your campaign just can’t be a failure. Or can it…

Can you really influence everything, have you really thought things through?

And there is a lot more from what that came from

Some long time IT observers and CIOs see the chief marketing officer as a threat to the CIO as nonsense.

But is he or she?

Weve seen this clash before, observes Enterprise CIO Forum community manager John Dodge.

In today’s market marketing teams are under more and more pressure to perform and get results. ROI is a magic word in marketing now-a-days, while budgets and resources are under pressure as well. In the meantime customers are holding back and getting less and less faithfull to just one brand. So, pressure is on for the marketing department, because you can only do so much to get better results.

There are several trends today which cause this higher pressure, says a paper by SAS.

• Consumers are more empowered then ever
• Data volumes are exploding
• New contact channels add complexity and dissonance
• You don’t control all the channels
• There’s more opportunity for confusion and noise
• Marketing organizations are drowning in data

How can marketers keep their head up in all this turmoil? How can they identify the best strategy that will deliver the best returns on from marketing investments?

Wilson Raj, Global Customer Intelligence Director at SAS shed his light on how to improve ROI on your marketing investments during a webinar sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association and SAS.  Optimization is the keyword, he says.

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