The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 6Structure

Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs—all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.

—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, American author, educator, and management consultant

Structure, the second discipline, is as important as alignment. How you structure the marketing team impacts how the team works; it impacts how you execute, both strategically and tactically; it impacts your ability to respond to change and to deliver a remarkable customer experience.

It's not the boxes of the org chart or the lines that connect them that is important, it's how those boxes and lines impact the people, the people's propensity for collaboration, and, ultimately, the flow of work. Any process that requires crossing organizational boundaries, from idea to delivery of value to the customer, carries the potential for problems, out-of-sync priorities, and delays.

Let's illustrate this with a common example: producing a digital marketing campaign, one that potentially involves display ads, emails, the building of landing pages, and analytics.

Challenges of the typical Marketing Organization

In the typical marketing organization shown in Figure 6.1, strategic marketers are responsible for strategy and for approving copy, images, and many other campaign details. Other ...