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How long has it been since your marketing team was restructured?
With our magical mind-reading hat, we'd guess it happened in the last two years.
Impressed by the guess? Don't be.
Research from Marketing Week's 2024 Career and Salary Survey shows that almost half of marketing teams have restructured in the last 12 months. (And the other half probably did it the previous year.)
Why do marketing teams restructure so often? Is this something new? Is it just something that comes with marketing? What does all this mean for now and the future?
CMI Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose speaks in this video and summary below.
Marketing means frequent change
According to Marketing Week's 2024 Career and Salary Survey, 46.5% of marketing teams were restructured last year – a 5 percentage point increase from 2023, when 41.4% of teams changed their structure.
But that's significantly lower than the 56.5% of marketing teams that restructured in 2022, most likely reflecting the impact of remote work, the fallout from the pandemic, and other digital marketing trends.
Maybe the real story isn't, “Gee, 46% of companies restructured their marketing last year.” The real story might be, “Gee, only 46% of companies restructured their marketing.”
To put it simply, marketing teams today have come to change frequently.
It raises two questions.
First, why is marketing experiencing this change? This is not the case in other areas of the company. Accounting teams rarely restructure (usually only when something dramatic happens in the organization). The same applies to legal and operational matters. Does marketing change too often? Or are other functions in the company not changing sufficiently?
Second, you may be asking yourself, “Wait a minute, we haven’t reorganized our marketing teams in a while.” Are we behind? Are we missing something? How do they organize themselves? Or maybe you're at the other end of the spectrum and wondering, “Are we changing too quickly?” Are companies that don't change as often better?
Okay, this is more than one question, but the second question boils down to this: Should you restructure your marketing organization?
Reorganize marketing
Centralization emerged as the theme emerging from the pandemic. Gartner reports (registration required) on a significant shift to a fully centralized model for marketing in recent years: “(R)occupations across the marketing organization have shifted. Marketing’s sole responsibility for marketing operations, marketing strategy and marketing-driven innovation has increased.”
According to a Gartner study, the share of marketing taking sole responsibility for marketing operations, marketing innovation, brand management and digital increased by double-digit percentage points in 2022 compared to the previous year.
What does all of this mean for today in plain language?
As teams work in isolation, it becomes increasingly difficult to create a collaborative environment. And marketing and content creation processes are complex (there are lots of people handling smaller parts of creativity, content, channel management, and measurement). So these days it's much harder to get things done unless you're working as a large, cohesive team.
Honestly, it comes down to the question: How do you communicate and coordinate your content better? This is innovation in modern marketing – an idea and content factory that works in a coordinated, consistent and collaborative manner.
Let me give you an example. All 25 companies we worked with last year experienced restructuring fatigue. They were not eager creative, operations, analytics, media and digital tech teams pushing for more new roles, responsibilities and operational changes. They were still trying to wrap their heads around the latest restructuring.
What worked was fine-tuning a largely centralized model into a fully centralized operating model. It wasn't a complete restructuring, just a push to move forward.
In most of these situations, Gartner's data was correct. Marketing has changed to have a tighter and tighter group of diverse teams working together to collaborate, produce and measure more efficiently and effectively.
As Gartner said, in true Gartner fashion, “Small losses of sole responsibility (in favor of shared and collaborative collaboration) were also reported in capabilities essential to digital-led growth, including digital media, digital commerce and CX.”
Companies have given up on the idea that marketing owns a part of the customer experience, content type or channel. Instead, they moved to a more collaborative exchange of customer experience, content type or channel.
Rethink marketing reorganization
This development can be productive.
Almost 10 years ago, Carla Johnson and I wrote about this in our book Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing. We talked about the idea of “Building to Change”:
“Tomorrow’s marketing and communications teams will succeed by learning to adapt – and by putting systems of engagement in place that make adapting easier. By continually building on change, the marketing department builds itself toward success.”
We assumed that the marketing team of the future would ask not what they were changing into, but why they were changing. Marketing today is at a tipping point.
The fact that half of all marketing teams restructure and change every two years may not be a response to changing markets. Maybe that's exactly how you should think of marketing – as something fluid that you build and transform into what you want it to be tomorrow, rather than something you have to tear down and restructure every few years.
The power of this perspective is not in knowing that you need to change or what you will change into. The strength lies in the ability and capacity to do everything marketing is supposed to do.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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