Marketing Profs

CMOs of global companies are now confronted with unparalleled challenges—and opportunities:

Marketing accountability: It is no secret that CEOs are demanding greater ROI on their marketing investments. Consequently, many CMOs are driving initiatives to make the marketing function more accountable and measurable.

Globalization: Serving global markets necessitates that marketing coordinate campaigns across continents to leverage cost and synchronize messaging; however, campaigns must also meet local needs and norms.

Complex consumer expectations: Consumers have become increasingly vigilant about spam and privacy. Compliance with the regulations of each country and state is mandatory.

Mergers and acquisition (M&A) integration: Frequent M&A places constant demands to rapidly integrate messaging, Web, and collateral of newly acquired companies into the corporate brand. Inadequate marketing budgets frequently associated with acquisitions place additional stress on existing budget priorities.

New marketing technology: The advent of new internet technology has enabled unprecedented interactive dialog with customers. This presents a huge opportunity for forward-thinking companies to target and reach customers in personalized ways. However, new technologies must be implemented and integrated across the world with regional marketing teams that execute campaigns locally.

Stakeholder agreement: Coordination with regional marketing groups, product business units, and sales is a major task. Processes are needed to prioritize and support new product introductions and demand generation within marketing budget constraints. Terms such as "What constitutes a qualified lead?" need to be standardized worldwide. Otherwise, roll-up, visibility, and accountability via actionable CMO and campaign dashboards become nearly impossible.

Marketing Operations Emerges as a Discipline

Faced by these demands, many CMOs have commissioned a marketing operations organization to tackle these challenges. Originally designated to create metrics and dashboards for accountability, marketing operations is increasingly being treated by leading companies as a foundation to the marketing function.¹

Marketing operations is the only function (other than the busy CMO) that manages marketing from an end-to-end perspective. Marketing functions such as PR, product marketing and regional marketing only see a portion of the big picture.

"Marketing operations ensures marketing is run as a business," states a VP of Marketing Operations at a major Silicon Valley firm, "We strive to enable the marketing organization to be streamlined in day-to-day processes so they have time to think, focus on the customer and to innovate."²

The 5Ts of Marketing Operations

What constitutes marketing operations? Based on our work with clients, and in our research, we have found that marketing operations is an emerging dimension to the marketing mix. Enabled by new processes and technology, it goes beyond the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), and 3Cs (Customers, Competitors, Corporation³), to fully round out the marketing mix.

The 5Ts of Marketing Operations:

Total Strategy

Techniques & Processes

Tracking & Predictive Modeling

Technology

Talent

By approaching marketing operations across these dimensions, CMOs have an integrated approach to enable marketing worldwide.

Let's describe the 5Ts in more detail.