Marketing Operations at Work

We salivate over the promise and vision of Integrated Marketing yet few of us truly understand it and even establishing a common definition is a struggle.

We long for a seat at the decision-making table yet, in many organizations, Marketing has evolved into a low-stature mouthpiece and “cost center” that contributes little to the enterprise strategy and is treated as a necessary evil.

Our power is further usurped as increasingly more organizations turn over responsibility for vital functions that were once the domain of Marketing to other departments: product management, the sales pipeline, customer experience management.

Many of us are working in Marketing departments that spend most of the time fighting fires and kissing up to CEOs, for fear that our corporate survival depends on such compliant behavior.

We’ve often settled for reactive, chaotic, dysfunctional work environments where we operate more like order takers at McDonalds and company mouthpieces (spin doctors) than real change facilitators and difference-makers in our organizations.

How many of us are really happy in our positions today, spending precious little time on strategy and customer-facing activates, operating with few resources and facing expectations that are growing geometrically?

Let’s face it: If we want to realize the vision of Integrated Marketing and Strategic Marketing, of a more collaborative and enjoyable work environment, of more stature and influence in our organizations, we need to let go of the old. Marketing needs a new MO.

And we have that new MO right in front of us, if we’re not afraid to embrace it.

It’s called Marketing Operations.

Admired technology companies (like Adobe, Symantec and Seagate) are leveraging Marketing Operations to improve performance and demonstrate Return on Marketing as they refine their Marketing organizations using an operational focus.

Marketing Operations is an emerging discipline that increases efficiency and drives consistent results in complex Marketing organizations.

It builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing Marketing strategy with processes, technology, guidance and metrics.

It creates both the infrastructure and ecosystem for individuals and teams to make informed decisions about Marketing mix investment, gain committed buy-in from stakeholders both inside and outside Marketing, collaborate synergistically across functions, optimize resources, and operate with discipline and accountability.

Organizations that embrace Marketing Operations are being viewed throughout the enterprise as profit (not cost) centers and fully accountable businesses.

Marketing executives with the foresight to build a Marketing Operations function in their organizations are blessed with an operational partner, similar to the COO/CEO relationship.

Directors and managers gain an invaluable resource to help them get the most out of their Marketing programs, make course corrections and learn from their experience.

Even the most inexperienced professionals gain by being part of a learning-oriented environment where they develop fundamental skills to operate effectively, stay accountable, and benefit from Marketing Operations-driven improvement programs, such as new competency development.

Marketing Operations is all about a new MO for Marketing.

In fact, it’s fair to say that the abbreviation for Marketing Operations (MO) is an apt descriptor of its potential impact in organizations. Marketing Operations is poised to literally change the modus operandi (MO) of Marketing.

And a new MO for Marketing in organizations is great news for all of us.

We won’t be such an easy target come budget cut time.

The average CMO tenure won’t continue to drop to embarrassing levels (less than 23 months at last count).

Employees won’t be so motivated to jump ship, taking their valuable, but siloed, institutional knowledge with them.

So whether you’re a Marketing executive, middle manager or early-career specialist, it’s definitely in your best interest to become a passionate advocate of Marketing Operations.

Embracing Marketing Operations is a win-win for everyone, but bringing its benefits into your Marketing function is an evolutionary process.

MO is both a serious commitment and a great opportunity.

Like all change initiatives, it requires careful and comprehensive thought and exacting implementation.

Key players in Marketing and other cross-functional organizations, such as sales and product development, need to be invited into the process early on and need to stay involved to achieve stakeholder ownership and buy-in.

The effort, however, yields impressive rewards.

Marketing Operations has the power to re-position and re-energize a company’s Marketing function, moving it past stubborn barriers to unprecedented levels of performance and success.

MO creates the type of Marketing organization where individuals and teams are empowered to do their best work and a culture of accountability leads to better results.

This in turn raises the stature of Marketing in enterprise.

Leveraging the discipline and rewards of an MO approach places Marketing in the perfect position to influence strategic decisions and help increase corporate revenue, decrease costs, and sustain high levels of customer and employee satisfaction.

Bottom line, embracing MO should be a no-brainer for every Marketing professional, from the most senior Marketing executive to the new junior staffer.

If your organization has not yet embraced MO, you have the opportunity to seize leadership, increasing your value to your organization.

If your organization is already leveraging MO, you can work to ensure its continued success.

Either way, Marketing Operations enables you to help yourself.

Gary

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As May comes to a close, I must say this has been a monumental  month for my family. My 13-year-old daughter, Miranda, has recently become a Bat Mitzvah, an initial step into the world of adulthood and an important time of learning about her culture, her world and herself. The parallels between Miranda’s growth experience and how Marketing Operations can fuel enterprises to new levels of maturity and insight — to become learning organizations — is the subject of my recent article that was published in the Business Marketing Association newsletter, which I am republishing here. "Building Upon the 5Ts of Marketing Operations: Applying Learning Organization Insights to Leverage ‘The Power of 18′" uses as its foundation another maturity-themed Marketing Operations article, written by our advisory board member, Adrian Ott of Exponential Edge, "Beyond the 4Ps: The 5Ts of Marketing Operations" (see accompanying post).

With her the introduction of her “5Ts of Marketing Operations” model, my colleague Adrian Ott has given us a vision of marketing that has evolved beyond the fundamental 5Ps (Product, Price, Place and Promotion with Positioning added for the purpose of this article) and 3Cs (Customers, Competitors, Corporation).

Interestingly, add the 5Ts, 5Ps and 3Cs together and the sum is 13, the age Jewish and some African cultures consider the entry into adulthood.

Enterprises that have invested in dedicated Marketing Operations functions are much like the Bar/Bat Mitzvah. They’ve completed an important rite of passage, but have much to learn before reaching a level of maturity.

Learning is the operative word when it comes to maturity. The ability of an organization to learn – to become a learning organization – is fundamental to its long-term development. In 1990, MIT Sloan School of Management’s Peter Senge rocked the business world with his visionary book, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization.”

Senge’s Influence on Organizations Hasn’t Translated to Marketing

Though the buzz of the learning organization has lost some steam after the dot-com implosion and 9/11, one can still find Senge’s influence in subsequent published works and today’s management lexicon, as well as in practice in some highly successful global organizations.

Difficult to find, however, are examples of conscious integration of learning organization principles from Senge and others into the marketing practice. We’re just starting to acknowledge that we’re behind other organizational functions in our learning process.

For example:

• Few of us can clearly justify our marketing investment and demonstrate the return it brings to our organizations.
• Our staff is expected to be loyal, deliver on increasingly-escalating expectations and wholeheartedly support our enterprises’ customer experience vision while simultaneously being treated as disposable assets.
• We’ve built such information silos around these individuals that we lose valuable organizational insight whenever someone leaves, whether by force or choice.

ROI. Optimization. Enhanced customer experience. Better knowledge management.

These are just four of many areas that Marketing Operations is expected to address. With the rise of Marketing Operations in the enterprise, this is the ideal time to acknowledge our immaturity – our learning disabilities – and take steps to toward greater maturity.

Applying the Five Learning Organization Disciplines to Marketing Operations

Senge’s insight represents a compelling path forward. Consider the five disciplines of a learning organization that he so masterfully described some 18 years ago:

1. Personal Mastery = Developing a commitment to individual learning to develop proficiency, not just in our work but our ability to clarify what is important to us and see current reality more clearly
2. Mental Models = Learning to question implicit assumptions underlying decision-making processes and balance advocacy with inquiry
3. Shared Vision = Achieving individual and group buy-in for key initiatives by securing enrollment, commitment and compliance
4. Team Learning – Aligning individual and team learning through a commitment to a balance of dialogue and discussion
5. Systems Thinking = Learning to view the system as a whole rather than focusing on the discrete parts

Each of these disciplines has huge implications on the effectiveness of Marketing Operations in organizations. Let’s explore how in a bit more detail.

Personal Mastery in Marketing Operations

We have long recognized the importance of training in marketing (even if for no other reason than to pay expected lip service to it). Marketing competency development (bridging the gap between current competency and desired future state) is a big buzzword today and an important component of Marketing Operations.

Marketing competency development is very much related to Personal Mastery, which can have significant implications when applied to other Marketing Operations disciplines such as strategic planning, collaborative decision-making, resource allocation, roles & responsibilities clarification, and team dynamics.

Mental Models in Marketing Operations

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and take action. We tend to unconsciously make decisions based on these ingrained mental models, which control what we perceive can and cannot be done.

Bringing the skill of surfacing and challenging mental models in Marketing creates a powerful vehicle for making decision-making processes more explicit, better understanding our and others’ motives, learning to appreciate differences and discovering common ground.

This has compelling implications in Marketing Operations when applied to strategic planning, socializing new concepts and plans, achieving buy-in and alignment, leveraging voice of the customer and encouraging innovation and value creation.

Shared Vision in Marketing Operations

Many companies fail to advance their objectives because key fundamentals, such as mission, vision and values, are either poorly defined or articulated, or they are imposed on the team by a CEO or other authority figure without the opportunity for real buy-in.

People are often lost in the shuffle when new marketing initiatives are rolled out. Employee ambivalence, confusion, resistance and passive-aggressive behavior are unintentionally or consciously transferred to customers, partners, press, analysts and other target audiences. Training, socialization and winning buy-in are integral to generating committed action.

Developing shared vision is more critical than ever. Consider:

• Marketing is becoming increasingly complex due to globalization and the emergence of new marketing and media channels
• Increasing C-level expectations on marketing are requiring greater need for cross-functional strategic collaboration and more coordinated execution to meet enterprise strategic objectives

The implications of leveraging shared vision in Marketing Operations (as is true within the enterprise in general) is improved ability to better socialize new Marketing Operations initiatives, achieve ownership and buy-in, define mission and charter, clarify values and more effectively align key players across organizational functions who are instrumental in making a vision a reality.

Team Learning in Marketing Operations

An important challenge for organizations is evolving from the individual as the learning unit to the enterprise as the learning entity.

Groupthink can be a painful symptom of organizations that have not learned from their experience. In “The Abilene Paradox,” the story of a group of cowboys deciding to go to Abilene for the day even though not a single one of them really wanted to go there is a telling reminder that more (however brilliant) minds does not necessarily equal smarter.

In work environments — especially fast-moving, outward focused marketing departments where we are motivated to show our colleagues how smart and competent we are — it’s a real challenge for the group to “get” the big lesson and see the internally-imposed barriers to its collective learning process.

Increasing focus on Team Learning in Marketing Operations also can have major impact on decision-making, marketing competency development, knowledge management, marketing intelligence, planning, process design, socialization and program evaluation.

Systems Thinking in Marketing Operations

To be effective, Marketing needs accurate information, a historical view into past successes and failures, and the ability to recognize patterns that link seemingly unrelated data points. To be optimally effective, we need the capacity to reflect and the critical ability to see patterns of interdependency.

Systems Thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It provides a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than isolated parts, and patterns rather than “snapshots” or “events.” 

By embracing Systems Thinking, we are forced to look outside self-imposed boxes of comfort that limit growth and creativity. We can use Systems Thinking to help us manage overwhelm from complexity and overcome “learned helplessness.”

Because Systems Thinking requires a balance of linear and non-linear thinking, it promotes “out of the box” thinking.

In addition to encouraging innovation, we can leverage System Thinking in Marketing Operations to support marketing intelligence, knowledge management, assessments, product portfolio and marketing mix management, process design, marketing automation, leveraging the voice of the customer and demonstrating return on marketing.

Introducing the Power of 18 Marketing Maturity Model

Each of the above learning organization disciplines can be added to the 5Ps, 3Cs and 5Ts to create a new marketing maturity model. Let’s call these disciplines the 5Ds:

Discipline #1 — Personal mastery

Discipline #2 — Mental models

Discipline #3 — Shared vision

Discipline #4 — Team learning

Discipline #5 — Systems thinking

Now we have an even more evolved marketing maturity model, which I’ve coined “The Power of 18” – 18 being the age that a person is legally considered an adult in the US, the UK and China, for example. By embracing “The Power of 18,” Marketing can more quickly evolve from basic maturity (5Ps and 3Cs) to deeper, more fundamental, more sustainable maturity (5Ts) to full-fledged, fully responsible corporate citizenship.

And the beauty is, “The Power of 18” is simply a substantial step forward. Like the other models that preceded it, we can keep building upon this model to reflect increasing levels of marketing maturity and mastery of lifelong organizational learning.

As we apply these proven business insights and tools to marketing, we will be better equipped to address the strategic, accountability, optimization, scalability and cross-functional alignment challenges Marketing Operations teams face now and into the future.

Gary

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