CMO Roundtable – The Marketing Department of the Future
We’re preparing for the next Flock CMO Roundtable in association with our Executive Search Partners Grace Blue and are excited to be welcoming marketing leaders from a range of sectors, to add to the buzzy and enterprising atmosphere at Gezellig in Holborn.
We’re going to be talking about the Marketing Department of the Future and within that, four main topics:
- Journeys towards the ‘Marketing Department of the Future’. Marketing leaders are feeling the need for significant change, in response to pressures from within (the CEO) and without (the rapid increase in the speed and complexity of customer engagement). And whilst CMOs are strengthening their views about what change is required, they are battling with the complexity of how to make that change happen, which can leave them not in control of events.
- The design principles for the structure of the Marketing Department of the Future. Increasingly teams are organised around Customer Journeys – which implies a much closer alignment of sales & marketing – and with a much looser set of role descriptions, to enable rapid ‘test and learn’ activities in small project teams. There is a much greater degree of in-housing, especially around content development and increasing specialisations around data & insights, creating content and serving content. A trend is the desire to embrace or even realign the marketing department around the leadership and management of all aspects of the ‘customer experience’, which taken fully on-board means marketing being involved in activities well beyond communications e.g. innovation, product design, customer service.
- The role of the centre compared to regions/areas and local teams in the marketing department of the future. Digital media is enabling the age-old desire to ‘squeeze the middle’ (regions/areas), as engagement through digital channels can be much more centrally controlled, removing some of the need for a regional layer. This is driving consistency and efficiency, but at the risk of losing local saliency.
- The importance of other defining characteristics of the Marketing Department. Culture and people are said to trump organisation design – the Organisation Design must support and reflect the culture and be achievable with the people you have and are going to hire. And process, data, technology, key performance measures and agency partners are key enablers. These factors, or the failure to address them, could help explain why some companies have reversed decisions to in-house certain capabilities.
- How to build efficiency into the design of the Marketing Department. Winning organisations are, working closely with Procurement colleagues, able to build ‘strategic efficiency’ into the way the department is set-up (e.g. in-housing, decoupling, leveraging technology), as well as achieving ‘tactical efficiency’ through the shrewd management of budgets.
We’re looking forward to hearing and in due course sharing what our assembled CMOs have to say about these topics. We expect to hear inspiring, thought provoking and revealing insights into their experiences and endeavours in building the marketing department of the future.
We have a few places still available so if you would like to attend please contact julie.marshall@flock-associates.com