Marketing Operations And the New Marketing Challenges

Today, Chief Marketing Officers face unparalleled challenges and opportunities. As CEOs demand greater returns on their investments, there is a growing emphasis to make marketing processes more accountable and measurable. Hence, the growing need for marketing operations.

The need for marketing operations has also become more pronounced in view of regionalization and globalization as companies need to coordinate the marketing function closely with regional and global marketing groups. This is essential in coordinating campaigns across regions and continents, particularly to have a unified message and to leverage costs.

Marketing operations also plays a more vital role with the advent of new marketing technologies, especially in integrating various marketing teams in executing campaigns based on interactive dialog with customers.

To address these new challenges, CMOs have either bolstered their internal marketing operations or tapped an outside organization which has broad experience in this area. Hence, while marketing operations in many companies was designed initially to create metrics for accountability, it has now become part of the basic foundation of the marketing function.

Compared to other marketing functions such as product marketing, advertising or public relations, marketing operations is the only function outside of the CMO that has an end-to-end perspective of marketing.

While we are all familiar with traditional marketing's 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and 3Cs (Customers, Competitors, Corporation), we are coming closer to the day when we will have to be just as concerned with what Adrian C. Ott calls the 5Ts of marketing operations. These 5Ts are Total Strategy, Techniques & Processes, Tracking & Predictive Modeling, Technology and Talent.