Marketing Governance

Jonathan Gordon, expert principal at McKinsey & Company, reflects on the future role of the CMO.

In an ever changing world, marketing changes too. But marketers need the right tools. So it’s time that marketingtools change too, says Jive Software in their whitepaper ‘Marketing Transformed’. Most marketers still depend on the same tools and methods they used 20 years ago: email, meetings, phone calls and desktop apps, leading to a lot of disconnects, inefficiency and pain. But change is finally at hand. New social business technology has the ability to knit cross functional teams together and empower marketing productivity in ways never possible before.

According to a recent study of over 1700 chief marketing officers, four out of five CMO’s anticipate a high or very high level of marketing complexity over the next five years, but only half feel ready to handle it. Those CMO’s have every reason to be concerned, according to Jive. The sheer size of the task has grown, with a more diverse market landscape to master, more communication channels to leverage, and a lot more data to take account of. The expectations have grown, too. Marketing departments are under greater pressure to develop more agile and precision targeted campaigns, generate more leads and ultimately contribute more to companies’ bottom lines.

Unfortunately, Jives states, marketing methods and tools haven’t kept pace with the demands. When it comes to the human interactions and collaboration at the heart of so many marketing activities like planning and executing campaigns, creating collateral, enabling channel partners and nurturing customer relationships – marketers have been stuck using tools from an earlier age: email, phone, face-to-face meetings, on-site events, content management systems and desktop apps. A few newer collaborative tools have entered the picture, but have tended to be piecemeal and limited-purpose.

All this causes that knowledge-workers need a lot of time to do things they aren’t supposed to do. Just think of all the effort and frustration that goes into fruitlessly searching for information, sorting through email, managing disjointed document revision cycles, struggling to keep all team members on the same page etc. etc Jive states. According to McKinsey Global Institute the average knowledge worker spends 19 percent of the day searching for information and expertise and another 28 percent of the day processing email.

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Matt Jauchius, CMO of Nationwide, discusses how he brought speed and agility to his marketing organization. The first step was to focus on changing parts of the organization rather than the entire organization. He hired new talent and made process changes. For decision making to be fast, a set of capabilities needs to be centralized while still empowering edge units that interact with customers.

Three recent research studies clearly demonstrate that technology has become essential to effective and efficient marketing and that CEOs and other senior executives now recognize the vital role that technology plays in marketing.

• In a survey of senior executives by McKinsey & Company, 52% of respondents said that digital marketing and social tools are a top ten corporate priority, and 25% said they will spend at least 3% of their total cost base on digital business initiatives this year.
• In a survey of marketers this year by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, 20% of respondents said they have a mandate from C-level executives and the budget to execute digital marketing initiatives, and 42% said they have strong interest and active support for such initiatives at the line-of-business level.
• In its 2012 Global CEO Study, IBM found that CEOs now rank technological change as the most critical external factor that could impact their business over the next three to five years. In the marketing area, IBM found that seven out of every ten CEOs are implementing major initiatives in their organizations to deepen the understanding of individual customer needs and to decrease the time needed to respond to market insights. Read More