Today’s marketers face the demands of operating in an increasingly complex environment, propelled by continued societal, technological and macro-economic development. Navigating these challenges requires a systematic approach to change, one that enables marketers to face future challenges in a tried and trusted way. This system is the marketing operating model.
A marketing operating model is a framework that links strategy and execution, laying out how a marketing vision carries through to day-to-day operations. It outlines the people, processes and technology that must be in place for marketing teams to function effectively within the business.
Where a marketing strategy is predominantly externally facing (focusing on how marketing activity can engage new and existing customers), an operating model is predominantly internally facing (focusing on how the marketing organisation should be best structured).
Although predominantly inward-facing, there are components of the marketing operating model that face outwards, like the agency operating model. This outlines how an organisation works with its external agencies to execute its marketing strategies by defining the resource, services and technologies required from such a partner. To create an effective marketing operating model, both internal and external requirements should be very closely aligned.
Our recent Media 2025: Wave 6 research revealed a tremendous appetite for changing the marketing operating model:
- 71% identified organisational structure in their top 3 challenges in achieving a successful transformation journey
- 51% believe their organisations have become more consumer-centric over the last 12 months
- 50% of respondents ‘very likely to change’ an agency operating model based on business transformation
Behind this change are 3 key components: customer centricity, technology and measurement:
1. Customer-centricity
The future customer journey is an unpredictable web of touchpoints that will ebb and flow as customer expectations change and behaviours evolve.
Where a customer-centric marketing strategy may outline the need to deliver the right message in the right place at the right time, a customer-centric operating model designs how the organisation needs to function to deliver such engaging customer experiences.
The contrast to customer-centric operating models are operating models that focus themselves predominantly on supporting the execution of a product or sales strategy, which can lead to a singular focus on acquiring customers rather than the customer’s experience or lifetime value.
Creating a customer-centric operating model is to democratise customer insights across internal and external agency teams to ensure all stakeholders maintain a customer focus. For example, a product team would benefit from understanding the audiences who engage with marketing campaigns to influence their future focus group personas, while a marketing team would benefit from understanding the user personas who engage in focus groups to influence future audience targeting for marketing campaigns.
A customer-centric marketing operating model needs to empower the exchange of customer insights across all internal and external teams, supported by a robust spine of data and technology.
2. Technology
The pace at which technology is advancing is unprecedented, but designing a structured approach to tackle this accelerating change is just as important as selecting the vendors, tools and platforms themselves.
Where a marketing technology strategy may outline what an advertiser wants to achieve from AdTech, MarTech and AI, a technology-enabled operating model focuses on solving how such technology can be effectively integrated into the organisation.
As technology evolves, there will be a need to add, remove and optimise platforms swiftly and efficiently with minimal impact on the day-to-day operations. This requires an operating model that enables flexibility, adaptability and continuous innovation within a marketer’s tech stack.
Establishing a technology-driven operating model is to build a scalable and modular tech stack, which allows the marketing team to switch tools in and out depending on the current requirements. This runs in contrast to legacy approaches of relying on a single vendor for all needs which, although may be more straightforward to implement, can ultimately restrict the ability to embrace and implement new technologies. Agencies can also supplement requirements through their own modular technology solutions, often enabling a ‘try and buy’ approach to drive speed and reduce disruption.
A technology-enabled operating model needs to empower the technology strategy to be unrestricted by legacy platforms, traditional ways-of-working and the inability to experiment.
3. Measurement
Our era of economic instability, combined with the advancements in marketing measurement, has left marketers under immense pressure to drive provable business growth.
Where a measurement-driven marketing strategy may outline the KPIs that will be tracked to guide campaign optimisations, a measurement-driven operating model focuses on how the organisation itself can consistently collect, integrate, analyse data and translate into insights.
Although the technology-led and customer-centric components are important, rarely do operating models with these two components gain momentum without a robust system of measurement in place – this is why a measurement-driven operating model is also essential.
Media 2025: Wave 6 also showed that ‘Measurement & Insight’ is the most sought-after capability for brands to bring in-house, with marketers increasingly moving towards building measurement infrastructure internally. This tells us that marketers want to keep these valuable insights under their control and stewardship, rather than solely relying on external parties.
Creating a measurement-driven operating model is to use marketing/media mix modelling (MMM) as a vehicle for incorporating data from product, sales and marketing teams into a single measurement solution. MMM is a good use-case for a measurement-driven operating model as it shows the correlation of marketing to business growth, while at the same time creating an ecosystem of data sharing within the organisation. Agencies will also benefit from such insights, enabling their measurement strategy to optimise towards business outcomes rather than just marketing metrics.
A measurement-driven marketing operating model needs to enable marketers to identify new trends and opportunities for revenue, profit and growth, not just optimisations for campaigns.
Conclusion
Now is the time for marketers to rethink their marketing operating models, assessing whether the environment in which their teams operate is truly set up to deliver success in the future.
This doesn’t need to happen overnight – a staged approach to redesigning the marketing operating model can be phased and modular.
Our recommended first steps are:
- Conduct a GAP analysis of the existing operating model, auditing the current processes, ways of working and technologies to identify opportunities for improvement
- Review your agency operating model, assessing whether your existing agency infrastructure is best setup to support the execution of marketing strategies
- Consolidate the findings to create a roadmap of ‘quick win’ initiatives that can add significant business value with relatively little business effort, proving the impact of the reimagined marketing operating model
If you would like to discuss how you could rethink your marketing operating model, please contact us.