Most Marketers Prefer or Have an Integrated Marketing Structure in Their Organizations

    Most Marketers Prefer or Have an Integrated Marketing Structure in Their Organizations

    In a bid for more scalability and flexibility, about 66% of market leaders now have a centralized marketing structure, reveals Gartner.

    A vast majority of marketers are developing their teams via increased centralization to meet the evolving and growing market demands. An integrated system helps to build a more flexible, scalable, and resilient organizational structure. Many businesses are still struggling between a mix of centralizing or decentralizing resources.

    In a recent research study by Gartner, it was found that an increasing number of marketing leaders today prefer the centralized marketing approach. More than 400 marketing leaders participated in a survey to understand the current marketing pattern across organizations. The survey revealed that nearly 66% of the marketing teams globally are entirely or primarily centralized.

    As mentioned by Chris Ross, VP Analyst at Gartner Marketing practice in the company blog post – “Marketing leaders have long been chasing the ‘perfect’ marketing organizational structure, hoping that the right one will help them realize greater value and scale from their organizations.” To accomplish this, an increasing number of marketing organizations are actively centralizing resources to more scalable shared services.

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    Undoubtedly, this initiative is enabling support for a distinct marketing discipline. The resources that have been decentralized to other organizational entities or regions are also being centralized and consolidated. In fact, 79% of all CMOs are not seeking new services or products – instead of existing markets to drive growth amid the pandemic.

    This rearrangement of resources is backing to the fully centralized models – wherein every professional marketing work is a primarily centralized model or entity. A majority of the professionals are integrated with limited staff circulated to business units or locations. The study also reveals that companies with a marketing operations leader are likely to have a completely centralized structure (35%), while without it is 23%.

    Chris Ross also cited, “The organizational commitment to placing a marketing operations leader indicates a meaningful investment in the marketing operations function. Marketing operations teams frequently operate in a shared services model, creating a natural gravitational pull toward a more centralized organizational alignment.”

    The benefits of such alignment include enhanced effectiveness and efficiency. It also involves improvements in marketing control or governance, and in the ability to manage the brand, customer touch strategy, and messaging. In the current unpredictable market situation, marketers are more focused on meeting competency.

    Basically, exploring the current organizational evolution is essential as resource patterns could organically driving the centralization. Even assessing the marketing governance and controlling risks to the business should be followed depending on its current model. More decentralized systems where more individuals have higher autonomy, could result in organizational risk.

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    Clearly, the global pandemic has accelerated the evolution of marketing operations. Hence, Gartner suggests marketing leaders who are looking to adopt a centralized structure need to pursue the usefulness and scale of a centralized organization.

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