Reinventing the Marketing Organization in the Analytical Era
Making the most of analytics, Big Data, and the Internet of Things in the world of marketing is a hot topic, maybe the hottest. Data and analytics are changing how organizations can understand, predict, shape, and continually enhance their customers' experience. But to deliver on that value proposition, marketing needs to undergo a change in culture, talent, structure, roles, responsibilities, and leadership.
While the traditional perception of marketing is very much along the lines of creative types made famous in the TV show Mad Men, or even the group that buys pens and T-shirts, the reality is that the best marketers today have a keen sense of and clear focus on the demands of the customer, through sophisticated analytics and data-driven methodologies. In our digital “always on” world, where we're continually collecting copious amounts of real-time data about our customers, marketing is in the best position to own and leverage that data to understand and service the customer in ways that the “mad men” of an earlier era could only dream about. And today's customers—knowing that we have more data about what they buy, use, like, and don't like—are more demanding than ever, expecting us to know and deliver precisely what they want, when they want it. They're also more informed about us; anything they want to know about any company or service provider is right at their fingertips. All of this data—what companies know about customers and what customers know about companies—has forced an evolution in how companies interact with the external world and how they create and sustain relationships with customers. In turn, those changes are driving even bigger internal ones; analytics are driving enormous transformations in how state-of-the-art marketing departments are organized, staffed, led, and run, and even how they interact with other parts of the organization.
In short, everything we have come to consider best practice in how we organize ourselves as a marketing organization will continue to evolve because of the new analytical era we have entered. As powerful as analytics are for transforming your relationships with your customers, they are equally transformative to the marketing organization itself. To fully leverage analytics, marketers have to modernize almost everything they know and do. This has caused a lot of pain and disruption for many of us in marketing and for many marketing organizations.
I know, because I've felt the pain of these changes firsthand. I'm a marketing executive who started out about twenty years ago when marketing was in a totally different era. Now, I run a large marketing organization and have had to navigate many dramatic transformations, not the least of which are the analytics and data, and have had to transform my organization in light of them. I have been on this journey to adjust and adapt my own marketing organization to keep up with the disruption we are all experiencing.
Today, our marketing organization has a new mind-set, a new structure, new talent, and new style of leadership. We needed to shift as an organization from thinking just about the visual and creative components of marketing to embracing a more data-driven and analytical approach to how we shared our messages. That required an evolution in our skill sets and how we went about creating more targeted and intimate conversations with our customers. But in order to accomplish those changes, we needed to rethink how we were organized and how leaders like me went about, well, leading this new kind of analytical marketing organization.
The purpose of this book is to share that experience and to help marketers transform themselves, and their teams, into more analytically driven and more successful professionals in the digital and social era. While there are many books and university courses that cover marketing analytics, data management, and even more on the subject of organizational management, my goal with this book is to provide other marketers like me a unique guide that combines those subjects. In short, this is the book I wish I had had when I led the marketing transformation at SAS. I've written this book to share what we did and how we did it and to provide insights and lessons to others, like you, who are also reinventing your marketing organizations for the digital analytic age. My hope is that in the pages that follow, I provide you with a firsthand, practical account of how to create a new marketing culture that thrives on and adds value through data and analytics. By sharing our story, as well as additional perspectives from other leading companies such as Lenovo, Visa, and Comerica Bank, this book reveals a new set of best practices to help guide your marketing organization's analytical transformation. I am not sure that we always got it right or that we did things in a way that will translate to every organization. We also continue to learn and evolve every day. But my hope is that I can give you the head start I didn't have by sharing our experiences as we went through our metamorphosis.
The Analytically Driven Marketing Organization: A Practical Guide
This book stems from my own experiences as a marketer and as the leader who drove the organizational changes to become an analytically driven marketing organization, but it's fueled by and infused with the inspiration I get from my team. Together we have been on an exciting marketing analytics expedition. Over time, we have identified and established a set of best practices, philosophies, and approaches that have increased our value as a marketing organization by helping us engage with our customers in ways that improve their experiences.
One of the critical lessons I've learned in transforming our marketing organization is to get buy-in and engagement from the key people, “our guiding coalition,” on our team. That's why in the pages that follow you'll hear directly from many members of my team who were part of our organization's transformation. Yes, I was helping lead the changes we went through and I share my perspective on that experience. But it was also a highly collaborative effort in which each member of my team played vital roles in our collective transformation. I think you will be inspired by the many voices that continue to drive change across the organization.
Becoming an analytically driven organization isn't only about having the right metrics, methodologies, or technologies in place. In fact, this book will not spend a lot of time discussing analytical tools or methodologies and how to use them. Rather, to drive the kind of change required to meet and shape customer expectations in the age of analytics, fundamental shifts are required in the marketing organization itself: specifically, changes in the marketing mind-set, marketing structure, marketing talent, and marketing leadership.
In this book, I present a practical guide, based on each of those four components, that distills how we've transformed our marketing organization and offers a road map for how others can do the same (see figure I-1):
1. Mind-set—from reactive to proactive
2. Structure—from silos to convergence
3. Talent—from traditional to modern
4. Leadership—from responsive to agile
Each of the four components has its own chapter, and in each chapter, I trace the path of change and offer guidance and advice on how to drive that change in your own organization.
Figure I-1
A practical guide for transforming a marketing organization
I've written this book for marketing leadership—marketing managers, marketing executives, and chief marketing officers—as well as for marketing analysts and specialists, campaign managers, digital marketers, and content marketers. If your job involves marketing, then this book is for you. All parts of the marketing organization have to envision, enable, and nurture an analytical culture. I have shared the experiences and evolution that we have gone through as a large, mature organization. Some of the lessons might be different if you run a small organization or even a start-up. I also haven't dug deeply into the specific tools we use to run our marketing organization; you can turn to other books for that help. My hope is that the content here will be relevant from a strategic perspective and supported by practical examples, thoughtful case studies, and best practices to help kick off your own journey to becoming an analytical marketing organization.
Within each chapter, you will read about how SAS and other marketing organizations are implementing analytics, redefining their marketing strategies, and transforming their cultures. Voices include marketers from across the SAS organization in multiple roles and levels, thought leaders on various topics, as well as stories and best practices from select companies. I've also included many sidebars, visuals, and ways to apply my advice to your organization. My favorite features are the “Marketing Analytics at Work” segments, which are stories of transformations from analytical marketers across the organization. There are interviews with chief marketing officers (CMOs), IT executives, thought leaders, and specialists in the field of analytics as well as examples from various industries and companies at different stages of marketing analytics implementation.
The book starts with an introductory chapter outlining why marketing organizations need to change, then follows with a chapter for each component of the four-part guide:
Chapter 1: Why marketing organizations need to change. Organizations must evolve from the silo-marketing campaigns of old to the new analytical approach of today. In short, the customer decision journey—how your customers find you—has changed because of the multitude of tools and data now available. Your customers have the ability to control their interactions with you. That means that how you as an organization respond to new customers—while nurturing and retaining existing customers— has also changed.
Chapter 2: Rethinking your approach. Marketing has traditionally been a reactive practice: you launch a campaign, wait for the results, and then try again. Now, that's insufficient. In order to connect with the modern customer, you need to embrace a new approach, with data, analytics, and technology that empower you to become proactive, agile, and responsive. This chapter discusses how to employ data and analytics to personalize customer interactions both inbound and outbound, how to nurture customers with the help of analytics, and how to be more agile and proactive than in the past.
Chapter 3: Realigning structures. To become an analytical organization, you need to rethink your internal structure. Specifically, you must realign yourself to become customer-centric, by creating a shared path across all channels and developing new partnerships and collaborations across departments inside the organization where marketing teams up with IT, finance, and sales in new ways. That means marketing organizations need to create a converged or unified view of the customer inside the organization, while also forming new interdepartmental relationships with IT, finance, and sales. It also means restructuring how your marketing team members collaborate and learn from each other by adopting best practices such as competency centers to help ensure that skills and knowledge spread through the organization.
Chapter 4: Hiring the modern marketer. The days of marketing as simply an artistic endeavor are gone forever. That's not to say that creative skills are not in demand; it's just that they alone are insufficient. Today's modern marketers need a wide variety of skills that include analytics, social media, storytelling, and creativity to be successful. In this chapter are examples of the new jobs we are creating related to analytics and marketing science, new skills and talents we need to hire for, and skills training for existing marketers.
Chapter 5: Leading the analytical organization. As an organization evolves to embrace modern marketing principles, it must also promote leaders with the kinds of skills to both orchestrate the talent within and tout the new value of marketing as a powerful source of revenue and insight. We'll discuss topics like how leaders can help cement relationships across the organization and how they can create cross-departmental objectives and reports to drive alignment to customers' needs. It's critical that leaders share the stories of their success as a way to drive home the value of marketing as a bottom line contributor and not just a cost center.
Conclusion: Where does an analytical marketer go from here? The book ends with my thoughts on where we go from here and on how to start your own journey tomorrow. The key to building an analytical marketing organization is, after all, the flexibility to continue to change as the needs of your customer alter over time. That's a challenge we are excited to take on.
Sample Job Descriptions: What new jobs have we created during our transformation? The job descriptions I provide in this section would have been invaluable to us several years ago, because they literally didn't exist at the time. We constructed them from scratch. I hope they serve as a shortcut in your transformation.
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Organizations like SAS are tapping the power of analytical thinking to drive new connections and conversations with customers by cutting through the increasing noise of the marketplace that threatens to drown out our message. Perhaps, in time, these same lessons can become a part of what business schools teach in the years to come.
We turn first to where it all starts by presenting our case for why the time has come to embrace the future of the modern marketing organization.