Whether or not we are in fact at a watershed moment in global marketing leadership is up for debate, but most of us as marketers can agree that the decades-long trend of expanding into new markets is increasingly set against the backdrop of trying to create a more tightly knit global marketing organization. More and more marketer roles with a pan-geographic focus are surfacing in our conversations with members. Marketing processes are incorporating a more diverse range of inputs from across organizations’ geographic footprint. Resource allocation post-credit crisis tends to be more reflective of countries’ future opportunity versus simply our historical habit of investment.

But amid all of this progress, marketers tell us that they still struggle to see substantial gains in global marketing integration. One member recently commented, “the discussion internally has clearly shifted toward capitalizing on the scale of our international marketing operations but, if anything, it seems that we’re moving further and further apart.”

So, what’s getting in the way?

Earlier this year, MLC concluded a thorough analysis aimed squarely at this global marketing integration challenge. It turns out that despite all of the structural improvements (new roles, processes, resourcing methods), we still face significant and growing difficulty fostering communication across global marketing teams. The figure below highlights four communication areas that surfaced as having become more important in the past three years, but which we see marketing organizations struggling to address.

The challenges are not insignificant: sharing information and best practices across regions, sourcing local insights, communicating and enacting a global marketing strategy, and getting regional buy-in to central marketing decisions.

Fortunately, some marketing organizations are beginning to chip away at these performance gaps so that the rest of us can learn from their experience. In recent conversations we’ve seen progressive marketing organizations pursuing tactics such as internal social media tools that drive familiarity across geographically isolated teams, or training that teaches pan-geography collaboration methods.

MLC members: we’ve documented a number of these “best practices” and published them here for you to examine in further detail. Feel free to email me with any of your ideas or questions at: mccancem@executiveboard.com.

Movement Towards the Center: Nearly half of members (48%) report control over marketing strategy has become more centralized in the last three years versus just 30% who say it has become more decentralized.  Furthermore, more than twice as many members house control over marketing strategy at the central level than at the regional level (32% vs. 14%), though a 52% majority says strategic power rests in both places.

Optimizing Global Marketing Spend: A clear majority of members (68%) allocate global marketing budget based on strategic opportunities such as growth – more than twice the 28% who parse it out based on revenue or profit generated by each region.

Challenging Times: We asked members to rate the changing importance of several issues related to global marketing such as global best practice sharing, talent development, and consistent global strategy.  Overwhelmingly, survey takers indicated these issues were more important than ever.  At the same time, when asked to rate their organization’s effectiveness at each challenge, most indicated low to medium skill.

Other interesting findings included:

• Branding was the marketing responsibility most apt to be placed exclusively under Central Marketing’s control, while pricing was most likely to be left to the regions.
• Public Relations and Digital/Social were the marketing services most likely to be housed at Central Marketing and shared/scaled across multiple business units or regions.
• When working with agencies, the trend is towards fewer, bigger partners with global reach vs. a larger number of local agencies with local market expertise.

MLC members, to check out the full survey results, click here.  And read more about our work on global marketing organizational structure on our Work in Progress page.  More resources and tools will be up early next year!

1) Innovation

As you’ve already seen in this blog (here, here, and here among others), we’ve spent the last few months looking into radical innovation.  Members tell us innovation is one of their top challenges, specifically innovating new products and services that will actually last in the marketplace.  One surprise we found? It’s not likely that crowdsourcing will get you there.  Find out more here. MLC members, it’s not too late to sign up for our session at Microsoft Dec 2.

2) Global growth/organizational structures

For the many organizations in our membership that have a global footprint, growth in 2011 is coming from different places than ever before – regions that were core to growth are now slowing, while emerging markets get increasing attention.  This has made many marketing organizations wonder if they are organized to capitalize on new sources of growth.  We’re building a decision tree so you can understand the tradeoffs inherent in any org structure.  Biggest trends we’re seeing here?  Overall centralization of marketing strategy, and an emergence of flexible team-based structures.  Keep an eye on upcoming newsletters for the research as it will be landing in the next few weeks.

3) Smartphones and other purchase disruptors

Smartphone ownership is the biggest trend out there (one of the few consumer categories growing like crazy) and one analyst even suggested that by 2012 smartphone sales will outstrip all PCs globally.  We’re on the cusp of launching an in-depth survey of consumer use of smartphones for holiday shopping.

Some of what we’re testing: how do customers think about buying on phone versus online or in-store and what kinds of purchases they’re willing to make?  What prompts on-phone purchase and what do consumers use to complete the transaction (apps or websites)?  How does screen size affect the way customers perceive product value?

Want to take our survey or send it to some of your customers?  Email me at <freemank at executiveboard dot com>.

By the way, the smartphone research is just step one of our look into purchase disruptors.  We’ll be fielding an even larger survey at the end of the month that dives deeper into changing customer purchase processes and particularly the influence of social networks on trial and purchase.

4) B2B customer research and how that has changed

One of our B2B members recently told us that 70% of a purchase decision has already been made when their customers contact them as suppliers.  That’s a scary statistic and one all B2B organizations are facing in one way or another.  We’re fielding a survey of how customers research purchases, how social media and online communities influence the consideration set and ultimate purchase, and what are key influencers in the early stages.  Want to participate?  MLC member companies who provide a customer list for the survey receive a customized report with their results.  Email me at <freemank at executiveboard dot com> if you would like more information, or take a look at this document.

That’s the major topic areas for 2011.  We’ll also be creating some workshops and shorter meetings (one I’m particularly excited about: helping members get better at personal creativity and problem-solving!).

Any topics you think we missed?  Ones that excite you or feel right on target?  Let the conversation begin in the comments section!

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your challenges or specific needs.  Contact us if you’d like to participate in any of these research projects.

Given this, it is not surprising that communication is one of the most frequently cited challenges in our member conversations about structuring and operating a global marketing organization.  The problem exists both between Central Marketing and regional divisions and amongst the divisions themselves.

As Erin mentioned last week, global org structure is all about tradeoffs – many of them focused on how centralized or decentralized control over marketing strategy should be.  With each org structure decision comes a unique communications challenge:

• In a Centralized structure, the CMO directs all global units in top-down fashion, optimizing for global consistency in strategy, brand, and messaging.  A big communications challenge here is the lack of a strong bottom-up flow to share local insight and adapt to local complexities.  Additionally, even when regions do have a robust pipeline up to corporate, they rarely talk amongst themselves and best practices are lost.
• In a Decentralized structure, divisional/regional autonomy allows for great flexibility and customization of both strategy and messaging.  While local insight is more easily accommodated, there can be weak communication and coordination at the higher global level, leading to off-brand messaging and inconsistent execution across regions.  Additionally, a lack of sharing between regions results in duplicative efforts.

Many companies try to fix communications problems by drawing dotted lines between every division head and regional head in their org structure.   The result a convoluted systems of dots and dashes and it generally has the nasty side-effect of complicating decision-making and bogging down speed-to-market.  Most of the literature on modern organizational structure argues that simpler is better and advocates organizing for faster decision-making or to reduce ambiguity.  In both cases, organizational complexity (which dotted lines invariably add) gets a big thumbs down.

The better communications fixes come in the form of process and system improvements.  Despite the time zone, language, and cultural barriers, frequent tele- and video-conferences are noted by members as critical tools in global marketing.  Technology can also lend an assist in this arena.  There are several online collaboration tools for everything from sharing documents to project management to facilitating radical innovation.  If designed correctly, intra-company social networks can also work.  Ultimately, communication and collaboration must be embedded in corporate culture.

MLC Members – More on the communications challenges faced by global marketing organizations and some ideas to address them are coming soon, but for now, check out MLC’s Internal Communications Toolkit.

Tell us more about how your global marketing organization is structured by taking this short 5 minute survey.

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Opportunities in developing economies are attracting a lot of interest across our membership these days.  Thanks to growth in emerging markets and slowdowns in the US, Europe and Japan, a number of folks we’ve spoken with are expanding their international growth goals.

This focus on markets that were previously on the back burner has triggered questions about how to best organize marketing internationally.  Our conversations with members have revealed a few key tensions every company’s global marketing structure needs to balance:

1. Local Customization vs. Global Consistency: Vesting decision-making power with regional marketing teams through a decentralized org structure allows for greater customization and responsiveness to local conditions.  However this structure can lead to inconsistent branding and variable Marketing quality across regions, as well as unnecessary rework.
2. Budgeting: Global Prioritization vs. Local Accountability: Central budgeting has the benefit of enabling big bets on the best new opportunities.  Alternatively, allocating budget regionally allows for profit and loss accountability at the regional level.  Many companies have opted for accountability in the past, but with greater interest in emerging markets, global investment optimization is becoming a higher priority.
3. Flexibility vs. Continuity & Expertise: Most organizations need some amount of flexibility to respond to new priorities and changing strategies.  At the extreme, a project-based organization is structured around teams that form and dissolve according to shifting priorities.  However, more staid structures with continuity of roles and responsibilities allow for in-depth organization knowledge and expertise.
4. Collaborative Decision Making vs. Organizational Simplicity: A matrix structure with dual or dotted line reporting keeps multiple stakeholders involved in decisions – for better or for worse.  Organizations need to be sure that the benefits of each additional reporting line aren’t outweighed by the loss of agility and costs of coordination.

MLC members, for more on organization structure, check out our archetype org structures and other resources.

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

MLC recently kicked off a project on structuring global marketing organizations.  Over the next few months, our research aims to benchmark members’ current organization structures, and also to provide guidance on ways to overcome common structural challenges and trade-offs.

Getting up to speed on the literature around this topic, I’ve run into a range of takes on organizational structure.  These seem to generally fall into three categories:

1. Organizing around an element of strategy.

In one camp, there’s literature on optimizing organization structure to elements of a company’s strategy.  For instance, organizing Marketing to reflect a long term customer relationship focus, or organizing to quickly surface and act on emerging opportunities.

1. Organizing with consideration to environmental factors.

Alternatively some authors focus on optimizing organization structure with respect to environmental factors (which naturally should play into strategy – but it’s a different starting point).  One recent article speculates that organizational structure will be most effective when it is optimized to local employees’ cultural values.  For example, a culture that values wealth accumulation might do better with a layered structure that allows for frequent promotion.

1. Organizing for efficient processes.

Finally, some intriguing recent articles advocate organizing around process-oriented objectives.  For instance, organizing for faster, better decisions by identifying key decisions and aligning structure, responsibility and authority with these.  Or similarly, organizing to reduce day-to-day ambiguity employees face, by simplifying structure, clarifying responsibility, and relying on skilled employees to coordinate outside of reporting lines.

All of these perspectives seem to have merit, and certainly no one excludes another.  However, I find myself wondering how far structure will take us in a global marketing organization.  It’s not hard to imagine that fixing a structure which actively contradicts elements of the company’s strategy, environment or process would improve outcomes.  But perhaps structural fixes are more likely to get a company from poor to decent outcomes, not decent to good – in which case efforts to optimize global organizations should be focused beyond the structure.

MLC members, are you interested in participating in our research on structuring global marketing organizations?  If so, I’d love to schedule a 30 minute phone call to learn about your experience and challenges.  Email me at elynchklarup@executiveboard.com to schedule a call.

The ubiquitous (and I can’t say illogical) choice is social media, utilizing their built-in technological advantage to engage customers who are by no means digital neophytes. Yet here’s the rub – our research shows that driving B2B loyalty requires insight marketing, marketing grounded in the supplier’s ability to use content to disrupt how prospects perceive value. That’s an incredibly high bar to clear through social media, particularly when sub-par online content just feels like traditional brochures or white papers ‘pushed’ to another channel. High tech marketers must exercise incredible care to respect the inherent interactivity and customer-led nature of social media. Proper execution requires two frameworks: one for managing entry into social conversation with frame-breaking content , another to manage the social media enterprise more generally.

Enter Cisco on both counts. In its drive to push into product and service adjacencies, Cisco needed rich content but also customer permission to enter the space. Rather than dive in head first and risk outright rejection from the target audience, Cisco sought influentials’ social media ‘watering holes’ that were potentially overlooked.  Once found, Cisco acclimated to the existing conversation, deliberately merging their content with the topics prevalent in customer discussion, constantly listening to ensure tone and substance matched appropriately (see graphic below). Only with social permission granted could Cisco fully convey the expertise it possessed, cleverly pushing customer thinking toward its differentiators in the discussed adjacencies.

Given that high tech marketers tend to be more active in the social media-sphere, fostering firmwide collaboration on all social efforts is no small feat. Whether it’s brand building or product adjacencies, our research highlights strong marketing leadership as a hallmark of successful social enterprises. Cisco wins here too. With a social media Center of Excellence focused on expertise building, Cisco’s Social Media Marketing Director looks to drive adoption across the enterprise, but adoption aligned to a common strategy. Evangelism is often priority #1, but policy oversight and change management come in a close second to ensure that common strategy doesn’t become multiple priorities.

With a content-rich strategy combined with credible oversight, high-tech firms can quickly reap the rewards from insight marketing combined with social media. Technology always forges ahead; hopefully high-tech marketing continues to follow suit.

MLC members, for more on Cisco’s social media work, please read the key findings from our 2010 research pieces: Insight Marketing: Shaping Customer Decision Criteria to Your Advantage and Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media.

One of the big lessons for me was the importance of organizing for innovation – but not the way you think.  Yes, one of the big questions we hear is about organizational structure, but what became clear during our session was that changing the way you look at your world, including your existing products and services and assumed customer needs, is a critical step to being more creative — even more than how you organize your people.

Here are two examples from the day:

1)  The Gore Capabilities Center

In addition to being a beautiful space and a showcase of W.L. Gore’s innovative products, the capabilities center is a place Gore engineers go to spark ideas about new products.  Why?  Because of how they organize their products in the space.

Almost all Gore’s products start with a polymer called polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE.  It’s also known as Teflon.  The founder Bill Gore discovered a way to make expanded PTFE, or ePTFE, and it turns out to have many useful properties: it’s insulating, has low friction, has low flammability and is biocompatible, among other things.  So GORE-TEX fabric takes advantage of the fact that the material is lightweight and allows air out but doesn’t let water in.  Gore’s heart patches take advantage of the fact that the material is biocompatible.  PTFE coated wires take advantage of the fact that the material is insulating.

Employees tend to think about the products by the way the company is organized (or not organized, as the case may be – Gore is also a fascinating case study in unusual organizational design).  So they have medical products, industrial products, fabrics, etc.

But the capabilities center reorganizes and reclassifies the company’s products by what capabilities they take advantage of: physical, biological, electromagnetic, etc.  This way an industrial application and space shuttle parachute may be grouped together, because both take advantage of the lightweight nature of ePTFE.  This simple change makes unusual links between products, and that sparks creative ideas.

2) Touchpoint mapping versus jobs and outcomes

One of MLC’s most popular cases – about understanding customer needs – is fundamentally about reclassifying as well.   It says that instead of starting with customer touchpoints (for example, a running shoe) and collecting customer feedback (“the sole wears down too quickly”), marketers need to understand what job the customer is trying to accomplish (run a marathon) and the outcomes they need (reduced risk of injury).  Then instead of creating incremental improvement (a shoe with a thicker sole), you can find truly under-served needs (a training community staffed by physical therapists).

There’s a lot more to it – MLC members, it’s worth a look over or we’re happy to talk you through it – but at the core it means that how you look at customer needs matters – instead of looking through the lens of your existing products or services, you need to understand customer activities and the metrics they use to judge value.

Same customers, same needs exploration, different organizing principle.  That’s how you organize for innovation.

MLC members, join us for an upcoming innovation session to learn how to apply these lessons to your organization.

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

My colleague Aaron dubbed 2010 “Year of the Re-Org” in January – and the member interest we’ve seen in organizational structure bears this out.  As planning season rolls around, we’ve been examining various org designs.  We’ve identified six archetypes that optimize to different benefits:

1. Centralized structures optimize to efficiencies of scale.  Marketing activities are handled by a central team and scaled across many divisions.  Unlike other structures, decision-making power is concentrated with this central team, which reports up to a CMO.
2. Decentralized Center of Excellence structures optimize customization to a division (product, business unit or geography).  Unique marketing teams report up to heads of divisional marketing; a central team of experts act as internal consultants.  Reporting lines are clear and simple, and there is no company-wide CMO.
3. Decentralized Shared Service structures similarly optimize to divisional customization.  The balance of marketing power lies in divisions, but a central team handles easily-scalable activities.
4. Hybrid structures ideally balance central scale with divisional customization.  Divisional marketing teams report jointly to a central marketing function and to divisions.  This complex structure is increasingly common in large organizations, as it reflects the highly–matrixed constituencies Marketing works with.
5. Segment-Aligned structures optimize customer understanding.  The majority of marketers sit within segment teams while a central team coordinates and handles scalable activities.
6. Project-Based structures optimize flexibility.  In this rare configuration, marketers are deployed to flexible, cross-functional project teams as needed.  Teams are typically temporary, designed to form, deploy and dissolve with the projects they address.

MLC members: Are you contemplating reorganization?  If so, check out our in-depth analysis of each structure including benefits, drawbacks, questions to ask and tests to run.

Few marketing organizations today have the analytical chops and creativity to squeeze gamebreaking insight from these increasingly rich data streams (see this prior post on coping with information richness).   Most marketing leaders will settle for a life preserver—they’ll outsource analytics to vendors or shunt it off to an analytics team buried inside of market research.

By contrast, sage marketing leaders will build surfboards to ride the data waves.  How?

I’d recommend taking a look at Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison.  The book purports to be a practical guide for boosting the role and value that analytics can play inside of large enterprises.

And in this the book succeeds.  For marketers with limited time, here are the punchiest portions.

The authors have put together a superb enterprise level maturity model, running across five stages of maturity and five elements of enterprise analytics.  Yes, there’s even a clever acronym–DELTA:

• Data—not just any data, you need accessible, high quality data
• Enterprise—well, more precisely, an enterprise orientation
• Leaders—analytical leadership
• Targets—strategic targets (meaning: apply analytics in strategic areas)
• Analysts—for the analytics grunts doing the heavy lifting

If you do nothing else, check out the attached excerpt (reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press.  Excerpted from Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Robert Morison.  Copyright 2010.  All rights reserved), which captures the key transition points across the model elements.  Assess your marketing team against the maturity model to pinpoint the spots that are inhibiting further progression.  The important insight here is that organizations should take a balanced approach to advancing analytics across these five areas.  Getting too far ahead in one area will waste resources.

For most marketing organizations, the best chapter will be the one on Targets.  The authors’ advice is spot on for marketers with limited resources (i.e., all of us)—focus analytics efforts to advance the firm’s distinctive capabilities.  Don’t just apply analytics to that which can be analyzed.

There are a few other gems worth calling out here:

• Fun factoid: 40% of major decisions are based not on facts, but on the managers’ gut
• Thinking about marketing org structure? The five pages (p. 104-109) on organizing analysts are well-reasoned, and worth reading for the logic that should underpin org decisions for other specialty marketing capabilities (e.g., shopper marketing, event marketing)
• The Hotels.com example may be worth emulating for many marketers—it describes how an analytics leader came into an organization, formed a tiger team, and radically improved the performance of a website in short order (p. 142)

Word to the brave: despite the authors’ best efforts, this is dry stuff.  Dry, but critical for marketing leaders looking to help their teams thrive in an age of social mobility (mobile social-ity?).  In fact, it’s probably like crafting your own surfboard—precise cuts, fits and starts, lots of elbow grease.  But the ride once you get up on that board…sublime.

But frankly, this too often turns retailers into myopic, proximity-biased incrementalists in their customer strategy (too harsh again?). Imagine my encouragement when I see retail CMOs begin to tout the very elements of customer-focused strategy their CPG peers have long known.

This new focus on the customer take two forms: organizational structure and marketing communications execution. Take Express, for instance. Organizationally, Express CMO Lisa Gavales (follow her on Twitter here) now owns all e-commerce activity. From a communications perspective, every touchpoint – be it on the store floor or the web homepage – displays the same visual branding. Express is Express, no matter where the customer encounters it. While a recent development at Express, MLC research would clearly indicate that customer-focused, channel-agnostic marketing communications will yield far higher returns to the whole portfolio than category- or channel-specific campaigns.

At Macy’s, you practically have CMO Peter Sachse committing marketing treason, saying, “What we don’t need to do is get new customers.” Yet he’s right, because he too has placed the customer at the forefront of marketing’s strategy, rather than a distant second to classic merchandising techniques. And what better way to do this than. . .wait for it. . .asking the customer! Sifting through NPD Group data, interviewing shoppers as they left the store, all in an effort to generate customer centricity. Much like Express, the end result is an inevitable broadening of Marketing’s scope of control (which of course we as marketers enjoy). Sachse states specifically that the web should be the brand’s hub, which can lead to innovative uses of the web as a marketing communications vehicle, as in this recent Macy’s campaign.

Yet for many retailers, the transition to a customer-driven marketing organization may not be as simple as having charismatic leaders like Gavales and Sachse. That’s where MLC research can help build the business case for customer focus:

• See how Tesco created an annual customer plan to implement improvements to the shopping experience grounded in customer insight.
• Read how Food Lion co-opted cross-functional partners by pre-committing them to next steps on customer-focused projects.
• See how Victoria’s Secret filters all customer-focused investments to ensure alignment with the brand and target customer.

The trend toward customer focus in retail is more urgent and necessary than ever before, as the sector seeks to reinvent its offering coming out of the recession. Those that fall behind in satisfying customers’ needs will likely get trampled in the next Black Friday rush.

Whither globalization? I beg to differ.

There was a bit of consternation at the Davos confab earlier this year as to whether the era of globalization was the root cause of the global financial meltdown, and as a result, perhaps it was time to roll back some of that interconnectedness. Nicolas Sarkozy was particularly pungent in his argument to this effect. Granted, globalization certainly hastened the onset of recessionary tendencies the world over; international capital flows have only increased since the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s sent a minor shock wave through the system.

Yet it stands to reason that with the right safeguards, globalization can again be a force for good.  In fact, many Western companies look to the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to provide the next wave of business growth. Success in those nations requires continued flows of money, goods, and labor around the world; protectionist measures would only make re-investment more difficult.

As a result, marketing executives must actively consider and act on the consequences of globalization, the recent economic meltdown, and the structural changes that may be required to optimize a global marketing function. To steal the cliché, what is the best mechanism to think globally and act locally?  Members are taking stabs at this from all angles – some pursuing greater centralization, others pursuing regional strategies. Then you have the Goldilocks approach (a compliment here) of HSBC – an amazingly consistent brand image worldwide, yet similarly strong local resonance.

To come out of the recession stronger than before, companies must rebalance their global portfolios to better adapt to emerging market opportunities and capitalize on untapped segments in the developed world. The way marketing structurally supports that global portfolio will have a large impact on company success. Substantive discussions should precede any structural changes to ensure the selected model best meets global business needs.

Personally, I think globalization will do a world of good for everyone, if pursued properly. It certainly makes sitting in an Amsterdam airport more interesting. And there’s my boarding call for BA 8456 to London City…

In the best of worlds, I see Marketing as the general management function of the company (don’t tell Sales). In it resides the most critical elements of commercial success: the customer and associated insight. Subsidiary to that, it contains market assessment, competitive position, brand development, marketing communications, etc. No one makes a customer-impacting decision without Marketing’s input and stamp of approval.  Again, best of worlds.

Yet oh how far most organizations are from that ideal. Marketing clamors to prove value with metrics and dashboards, struggling to remove itself from the dreaded SG&A CFO line item. The term “cross-functional” is more worn than an old suit. Not that Marketing can go it alone, but to live a day without subsisting on the beck and call of the next desired piece of sales collateral – that would be heaven.

Progressive marketing organizations are using the opportunity provided by the recession to rethink old-world organizational relationships. A direct question from a B2B software provider last week: “Who typically owns the customer experience?” Answer: typically no one function. So why not Marketing to drive the required coordination? Another question from department-store retail: “Social media impacts every function in our company – who should take the lead?” Why not Marketing as the subject-matter expert? More companies than ever are asking why their disjointed commercial operations are artificially delineated by Marketing and Sales. Why not an integrated function?

There is latitude for organizational realignment in 2010 as executives demand a return to growth, and a pressing need for marketing leadership within a forever-changed customer landscape. Without insight into rapidly changing customer needs, any effort by R&D or Sales will fall short. Without social media guidance, HR and Legal may shut down burgeoning efforts to produce low-cost, high-quality insight. There is opportunity for Marketing to assert its primacy in the portfolio of corporate functions and the case is clear. The only question remaining is whether the function can seize the chance.

So how about an even-handed assessment of things to watch for in 2010? Even the cynic can provide that.  Here are three big macroeconomic and marketing-specific trends every marketer should follow in earnest:

Macroeconomic Trends

1)      Consumer Behavior and Economic Recovery – It’s unclear whether a true recovery stimulated by increased consumer spending will occur. Regardless, marketers should closely track the salience and imprinting of consumer behavior patterns exhibited during the worst of the recession into 2010. Is the ‘cool-to-be-frugal’ mindset permanent? Is consumer spend retrenchment category-specific? How do smart marketers stimulate similar consumer behavior for their brand? Members, join us for a webinar January 28^th to hear our take on the recession lessons marketers might soon forget.

2)      U.S. Federal Debt and the Declining Dollar – With continued weakness in the world’s reserve currency, US-based companies will find overseas operations ever-more expensive, while the US activities of firms headquartered in Europe or Asia will be hit once by the lack of consumption and a second time by miserable exchange rates. As Congress raises the national debt ceiling, foreign governments will continue to raise red flags on US creditworthiness, potentially impacting cross-border direct investment around the world.

3)      Unemployment and Labor Markets – With very few predicting improvement in the overall employment picture, the fact that it correlates too well with discretionary consumer spending bodes poorly for 2010. But for our businesses, there is incredible opportunity to hold on to and find the right marketing talent, without whom the hill to climb will be even steeper.

Marketing Trends

1)      Social Media 2.0 – In case you haven’t noticed, social media is kind of a big deal. 2010 will tell us how big a deal. From how Twitter will endure to the privacy concerns inherent in Facebook, the churning sea of social media will quickly separate marketing winners from losers. Fast-cycling failure and embedding social opportunities into marketing communications planning are just two ways to keep up. Members, see our full suite of social media resources here.

2)      Organization Structure – Now more than ever, marketers are asking us about the ‘right’ organizational design. Whether looking to achieve cost savings through efficiency, embed digital/social without upsetting entrenched hierarchies, or simply find a new way of doing business, structure conversations are unavoidable.

3)      Resurgence of Innovation – As pipelines dried up along with innovation budgets across 2008-2009, there’s a remarkable gap in many categories between the last disruptive innovation and today’s drastically changed customer outcomes. Leading marketing organizations are finding creative ways with budgets to ensure innovation is no longer under-funded as they look to beat competitors into the daylight the economy seems to show.

Best wishes to all our members on a successful 2010. Let’s hope the realist in me becomes a bit happier across the year and puts the cynic to bed.

Unfortunately, many of the marketing reorganizations that will kick off in 2010 will take a year or two to implement.  Right around the time that key players settle into their new roles, teams start to gel, and new processes start to fire on all cylinders, market conditions will have changed, and it will be time to start all over again. 

Having seen this scenario play out more than once, some CMOs are searching for a new model—an organization that adapts to changing markets, and doesn’t require a wrecking ball every three years.  Sounds nice, but what does that actually look like?  Here are a few of the tenets we see emerging:   

• A common view of target customers that spans Sales, Marketing, and other customer-facing functions
• A common view of the company’s value proposition across all commercial functions
• Flexible teams, typically tied to segments and market opportunities, versus functional silos
• Efficient flow of information across Sales, Marketing, and their key stakeholders

Marketers who’ve experimented with this model find that while flexible, customer-aligned teams present their own management challenges—albeit microscopic compared to the challenges of sweeping, function-wide reorganizations.  Similarly, when individuals are equipped with a single view of both customers and company, it’s much easier for them to bounce from team to team and take on new roles—even when teams and roles toggle between the traditional boundaries of Sales, Marketing, or Operations.  

While few marketing organizations will take the plunge and adopt this approach wholesale, here are a few steps any marketing organization can take to start down the path:

1. Establish a common set of priorities across all commercial functions, starting with Sales and Marketing
2. Define distinct roles for Sales and Marketing for achieving those commercial priorities
3. Codify a common base of customer understanding for all customer-facing functions

MLC Members: Before redrawing any lines, we’d suggest establishing some sort of baseline on what is and isn’t working.  Take our Commercial Integration Diagnostic to help you pinpoint breakdowns and spot competing priorities across Sales and Marketing. 

And to celebrate the coming year of the tiger, click here to see the best tiger-related ad of 2009.