Connecting for growth: A makeover for your marketing operating model

Achieving marketing aspirations and goals has become more challenging than ever as capabilities and tech have gotten more sophisticated. Marketing leaders are responsible for traditional marketing functions (such as brand, creative, and consumer insights) and for newer digital channels (such as performance marketing, retail media, and social media marketing). All this is table stakes. Now CMOs’ scope has expanded to include functional topics that span AI, commercial, design, innovation, and product capabilities. Consequently, the job of growth-marketing leaders has gotten more complex as they increasingly wear multiple hats in their organizations.

With the world of marketing becoming more expansive and complicated, achieving growth means defining a new holistic marketing operating model. Such a model encompasses a strong organizational structure, clear processes, and reinvigorated capabilities under the rubric of a clear strategic direction. This model more seamlessly connects the dots across the wide-ranging responsibilities of high-growth marketing leaders.

Marketing leaders must deliver across four pillars of marketing excellence. They need to execute a clear marketing strategy with insight-led growth, produce best-in-class efficiency and effectiveness via marketing performance, and champion the latest and highest-impact tech-enabled marketing use cases, all while building a fit-for-purpose operating model.  To succeed, marketing and growth leaders can focus on three areas:

1. Connecting teams: Organizational structure.  The first imperative for reenergizing and reimagining a marketing operating model is to take a good, hard look at how well a company is organized for growth. To be effective, CMOs need the ability and agility to consistently work across functional silos, build and scale capabilities, share best practices, and set cascading growth objectives. Sometimes, the disjointed nature of an organization can be a challenge. Critical remedies include dismantling barriers to mobilize cross-functional teams for growth, driving strategic priorities cohesively, and developing areas of excellence for new capabilities.
2. Connecting ways of working: Governance and culture.  The second imperative for a new marketing operating model is to define clear governance that helps an organization pivot quickly and adapt to a changing consumer landscape in an agile way. CMOs can pave the path by shaping the right governance and culture to encourage entrepreneurialism for growth.
3. Connecting expertise to growth drivers: Capabilities.  To achieve companies’ growth agendas, marketing leaders must make bold, meaningful investments in growth capabilities. This includes existing but potentially underdeveloped areas, such as creativity, as well as analytics and data. It also includes cutting-edge capabilities, such as gen AI. Partnerships and outsourcing of specialist capabilities also remain crucial, as does balancing new and existing capabilities.