The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Organization Structure – the Office of Influence Performance Management

I agree with the assertions of the CIM identified earlier in this chapter – that is, marketing requires greater specialization to maintain proficiency let alone to create competitive advantage; and the same applies to the influence processes. Actually, in my opinion, there are two extremes. Just as you may prioritize having the deepest domain expertise in government affairs or customer service, the Chief Influence Officer and team of influence professionals are expert in their generalist understanding of all the activities and parameters entailing influence flows. They are as comfortable discussing the latest thinking in resonance-based advertising on Twitter as they are reviewing the training and development programme for retail staff; as fluent in marketing research approaches as social Web analytics as corporate social responsibility as internal communications as contributing to the functional requirements definition of CRM and BI (business intelligence) systems.

On the face of it, the emergence of such ‘expert generalists’ accompanied by the deepening of specialist domain expertise leaves less room for those with mid-breadth and mid-depth outlook. It might well be that those who find themselves in such a position need to make a call as to whether to grow breadth or depth, but this will pivot on the degree to which an organization layers or rather delayers its structure.

As you’ll recall, Kaplan and Norton ...