CMOs have long talked about collapsing organizational silos, creating a single view of the customer, and fostering a genuinely holistic business approach. Many even fancy themselves as working toward that. But in today’s economic climate, where contributing to measurable, meaningful growth and aligning their goals to the business’ has become part of every CMOs charter, it will likely come as a surprise that others see marketing not as part of the solution but part of the problem: Recent research from Gartner finds that 55% of business collaborators say marketing inhibits the success of cross-functional initiatives. 

Too many marketing organizations are not built to support the needs of the business. Often, marketing isn’t contributing to growth in the way that it theoretically should, because it can’t. Misalignment between functions – frequently sales, marketing and product – has created a series of disintermediated metrics and key performance indicators. The result is that there is too little (and sometimes zero) alignment on business-level goals.  

The C-suite, especially CEOs and CFOs are losing patience and becoming more vocal about what matters: Return on investment. Revenue attribution. Pipeline progression. Intersection with sales. What they’re sick of hearing? More about marketing creative, Net Promoter Scores or metrics that are disconnected from financial performance. CMOs need to think in terms of business performance. 

As organizations integrate more demand generation capabilities into their strategy– this puts increased requirements on relevant content, integrated sales and marketing data, and the need for holistic customer experience understanding in too many ways, they are still a throwback to the decades-old approach of spraying, praying and pushing people along in the funnel.  

The entire marketing process must be optimized to support in-market demand generation use cases.  

We know it isn’t as sexy as spending on award-winning advertising campaigns. To find meaningful growth, CMOs need to focus on operating processes and lay the organization-wide groundwork for integrated brand-to-demand strategies. They need to think about GAAP performance measures in addition to Cannes, partnering closely across the C-suite to focus on business metrics.  

Is Your Organization Built for Growth? Answer These Three Questions 

CMOs have been sprinkling the right buzzwords into their strategy plans for years, and many talk a good game around the integration of brand and demand. However, the urgency is increasing: Sharper tech and increased focus on ROI make it increasingly futile for CMOs to hide outdated marketing processes. Growth-oriented CMOs should consider these three immediate-term steps and ask themselves:  

Are your brand and demand marketing teams truly integrated?

Think hard about the demand marketing processes already in place. Are they written into and coded within marketing automation? Is everyone clear about the brand governance touchpoints throughout the performance marketing process?  

What are we learning and where can we experiment to optimize our efforts?

Solution-focused CMOs are always looking for growth, which means establishing and piloting next-gen demand marketing use cases. This often starts with an evaluation of historical in-market performance against benchmarks to review areas for improvement and experimentation. These experiments must be ongoing, defining and pressure-testing updates to process and operating models. Those insights will help inform end-to-end campaigns that bring teams together, documenting and codifying the process from the very beginning, making it easier to replicate them. 

Does your team have the right mix of skills to deliver across both brand and demand requirements?

Customer-centric and growth-minded CMOs need to balance the right capabilities to deliver against expanded requirements of end-to-end brand and demand campaigns. This means having the ability to scale creative and content across channels and touchpoints AND supporting performance optimization with analytical rigor. 

In the fifth and final installment from our Brand-Demand Love series, informed by our conversations with marketing leaders across industries, we’ve outlined the steps to integrating brand and demand marketing capabilities to win in a complex and dynamic landscape.

If we think of marketing organizations as households, they are often not very harmonious, thanks to the common tension between brand and demand generation teams. Our blog series has described why these two marketing disciplines struggle to work together to achieve mutual success. To attain productive and peaceful integration, brand and demand teams must define the best ways to organize people and teams, collaborate productively and deploy the right capabilities and tech.

Overcoming Fragmentation 

In our discussions with marketing leaders, the brand-demand split in organizational structures was a common challenge. “One of the big barriers for marketing in our industry is how we’re structured,” a technology CMO told us. “There’s the performance marketing team on one side and then there’s everyone else, including brand people, on the other.”  

In many businesses, brand and demand are viewed as unrelated capabilities, run by disparate teams with little to no insight into each other’s activities or results. Other common symptoms of unhealthy brand-demand organizational structures include:  

• Separate planning cycles and budgeting exercises 
• Distinct KPIs that often do not align with broader business objectives
• Lack of knowledge sharing
• Talent deployed to standalone channels or capabilities, with little cross-functional collaboration or rotational assignments  

When marketing teams are organized this way, it’s impossible for brand and demand teams to communicate openly, share data freely, or collaborate productively – much less fall in love again. 

A manufacturing vice president of marketing told us that fragmentation is largely down to leadership:

“If your teams are fractured and chaotic, that’s because your leadership is fractured and chaotic.”

This speaks to the importance of leadership in ensuring different functions work together toward shared, big-picture goals. 

Rethinking the Marketing Organization Chart  

There’s no single ideal structure for a marketing organization, but certainly, brand and demand should not be managed as separate entities. Some top performers organize their teams around customer type, while others use product line, channel or functional discipline. Again, there’s no definitive best practice. A B2B manufacturer that restructured its marketing operation around how customers buy, rather than product lines, became more responsive to business needs.  

Marketing at 7-Eleven is organized by discipline, according to CMO Marissa Jarratt, but with a recognition that no one works in isolation. For instance, the company established a customer analytics and insights team to inform business decisions. “Then came the responsibility to socialize those learnings across the organization in a thoughtful way,” she said. “You can have really smart people, but it has to be a team sport.”  

Fostering Collaboration 

No matter the organizational model companies choose, collaboration is key. Collaboration can take many forms:  

• Joint strategic planning sessions 
• Monthly knowledge-sharing sessions 
• Flexible campaign planning exercises and roles, including metrics definition and budget allocation  
• Integrated campaign performance readouts 

All of these activities can – and should – include external agencies, consultancies and other third-party providers, as well as in-house agency capabilities where relevant. “We need holistic collaboration from our partners to help us work through our evolution,” said Shelley Haus, CMO of Ulta Beauty. Indeed, several marketing leaders who we interviewed considered external partners to be part of the marketing organization and capable of helping bridge the brand-demand divide. 

Collaboration can also help solve tactical issues. For instance, brand and demand teams both want efficient and effective content marketing capabilities, which require coordination and asset sharing. “We need atomized content approvals and integrated digital asset management flows so content and images can be reused quickly and easily by many teams,” said a senior marketer at a large financial services firm. “Otherwise, teams can’t streamline timing or use a ‘test-and-learn’ approach based on integrated results from everywhere.” 

Boosting Brand-Demand Integration Through Capabilities, Talent and Tech 

Several marketing leaders we interviewed talked about the pressing need for new talent. Everyone is looking for data scientists, business analysts and digital strategists; thus, brand and demand teams should look to share in-demand specialist resources.  

More than one marketing leader described the need for more communication and training across disciplines to promote better understanding. Job shadowing and rotational assignments can help in these areas. Another challenge involves varying experience and backgrounds: “Brand marketers run the show and they all went to the same business school, while performance marketers all come from DTC brands,” said Ashley LaPorte, ex-CMO at Seventh Generation. Organizational design and cultures that emphasize collaboration and shared goals can help overcome these barriers.  

Compensation models and incentives are other effective levers for driving integration between brand and demand. Defining joint performance goals tied to overall business performance may facilitate the shift away from time and expense cost models to more incentive-based pay models, which would encourage brand and demand marketing teams to collaborate more frequently.  

Technology has a role to play as well. A strong MarTech stack can successfully integrate data across disparate sources and promote connectivity among different functional areas. Adopting content personalization at scale requires integration across brand and demand teams – and their corresponding tech stacks. Performance marketing functionality can also be embedded directly into tech platforms to give brand teams more access to relevant insights and tools.   

The new research report, “Brand and Demand: A Love Story” is here! Learn how today’s Brand and Demand Generation leaders are bringing their functions together to drive greater impact.
Download today!