Brands are getting a whole lot smarter about their customers, thanks in large part to their increasing ability to leverage Big Data as well as advances in marketing automation. If you really know your customers, and have the means to engage with them regularly, then knowing how to evolve your products to secure their loyalty is fairly straightforward.
Since virtually all customer touch points are owned by the marketing department, does it stand to reason that marketing now controls the organisation? If not, how far does its influence reach?
To find out, we surveyed 240 digital marketers at Fortune 500 companies in the US this past February and March about how much they control and influence over various functions within their enterprises.
Domain Rulers
Not surprisingly, classic marketing activities sit squarely in the marketer’s domain: advertising, paid media, content marketing, branding, social media marketing, SEO and so on. These activities directly affect how consumers perceive a brand and its products, and are the things marketers are really good at. And as consumers ramp up their use of social marketing and online research, these activities assume greater importance within the organisation.
As for the tools of their trades, 68% of marketers report owning their organisation’s analytics and measurement functions, and 61% say the same about marketing automation. And though consumers are increasingly mobile, only 60% report ownership of their company’s mobile initiatives, though another 34% say they’re influential stakeholders.
Growing Influence, But Not Owners
All marketers we talked to agreed that over the past several years, the extent to which marketing is involved with a wider range of functions has grown, but in many cases this involvement stops far short of controlling such functions.
For instance, 41% of marketers say they influence their enterprise’s tech investments, and 39% say the same about their company’s CRM. In other words, when it comes to innovation or technology, marketing is more likely to “have a say,” but cedes ultimate control to other parts of the enterprise.
Customer Centricity
So if the marketer is now controlling or influencing more decisions and functions within the enterprise, does that mean brands are more customer centric? The answer is overwhelmingly yes: 51% of marketers agree that their organisations are increasingly customer centric, while another 24% say they strongly agree.
Curiously, 8% say they disagree or strongly disagree that their brands are more customer centric. It would be interesting to track these brands in the future to see long-term consequences of those attitudes on their brand relevance and market share (interesting, but impossible since we collected anonymised data).
Plays Well With Others
In the beginning of my career, the sales organisation was often at odds with the marketing department, and both tended to blame engineering and product development when results failed to meet expectations. And of course, customer care faulted everyone for everything.
Do these functions still operate as unique fiefdoms? Or is the focus on the customer creating enterprise-wide harmony?
Clearly, marketers appreciate the insight of their peers, since 68% of respondents agree or strongly agree that cross-functional teams best meet the marketing needs of today’s brands. Another 10% of marketers take a more go-it-alone approach.
Feeling Good About the Marketing Organisation of the Future
Now that their control and influence are growing, and their focus is on developing cross-functional teams, are brands able to build a truly optimal marketing organisation?
Maybe not. More than half (53%) of marketers say they’re several years away from attaining a lean, mean marketing machine; only 19% see that happening within the next few years.
So what’s the take-away of all these findings? Clearly enterprises see the role of marketing in becoming a customer-centric organisation, but getting there still takes work. There are systems to develop, tech initiatives to be decided on, and an organisational structure that may still need mapping out. But if the marketing organisation is the brand’s internal proxy for the customer, then there can be no denying customer-centricity is a key goal of brands today.
