The Marketing Road Map

At many companies looking to achieve organic growth, a significant gap exists between their strategy and their operational effectiveness. While closing this gap is seldom easy, it is critical to achieving high performance. Accenture's High Performance research shows that marketing organizations that are operationally excellent consistently demonstrate three specific capabilities. Moreover, through our work with high performers, we have found that successful marketing efforts have four elements in common.

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For many companies looking to achieve organic growth, a significant gap exists between their strategy and their operational effectiveness. Accenture and The Economist magazine conducted research to identify marketing challenges affecting growth.

• Sixty-three percent of the chief marketing officers interviewed said their ability to set strategy was strong.
• Only 41 percent said their ability to plan to achieve that strategy was strong.
• Just 30 percent said they had the ability to execute on their strategy.

Clearly, the inability to "operationalize"—plan and implement—marketing programs successfully is a significant obstacle to successful organic growth. Operational road blocks are numerous, and include process inefficiencies, limited collaboration, unclear governance structures, underutilized assets, frequent reinvention, inaccessible data and high turnover of marketing employees.

While addressing operational roadblocks is not easy, it is critical. Accenture's experience in working with high performers indicates that operationally excellent marketers demonstrate three key capabilities that allow them to lead their industries in growth and value creation.

• Flexibility: The ability to move marketing resources (funds, assets and people) across brands, geographies and markets to pursue opportunities of greatest value. Marketing investment decision complexity—determining the right investment mix across product/geography/customer segment/marketing media/channel—has increased significantly over the last decade. Getting the right resources to the right opportunity—in real time—is a critical competitive differentiator.
  
  
• Speed: The ability to move from conception to in-field execution rapidly and the ability to revise in-field campaigns to maximize effectiveness. Failing to be fast to market can significantly damage company value: research has shown that being late to market by six months in fast-turning industries—such as consumer electronics—can lower profits by 33 percent and lower shareholder value by as much as 11 percent.
  
  
• Throughput: The ability to accomplish more marketing (and better-tailored marketing) to support expanding numbers of customer segments and products. Marketing throughput constraints directly limits a company's ability to support expanding product portfolios (80 percent of marketers report that their product portfolio has increased by 25 percent in the last five years). With as many marketers relying on new product introduction to drive growth, the ability to produce larger numbers of better-targeted marketing programs is vital to high performance.

How do the marketing functions of leading companies become operationally excellent? They don't achieve their leading capabilities by accident—these high performers systematically undertake structured programs to build operational capabilities. In our work with high performers, we found four important elements were at the core of successful program development efforts.

Marketing Road Map: Developing a marketing operations plan or road map provides high performers with a systematic process for identifying, prioritizing and building the right marketing operations capabilities to create value. Developing a rigorous business case, one that focuses the organization on outcomes and not on capability building alone, is also part of the road map effort. Without a road map, companies often either underestimate the task at hand or solve simply short-term tactical problems.

Value Architecting Process: High performers carry an outcome based perspective forward through value architecting, to guide their marketing operations initiative development. This value architecting process often begins with high performers modeling a variety of cost/benefit scenarios, to understand the impact of various development options. For example: Should we outsource certain marketing activities or build the competencies internally? Should we consider a hosted technology solution versus on-premise? In addition, value architecting identifies KPI (key performance indicators) that will be tracked to measure value generation. Value architecting helps companies ensure their overall marketing operations solution maximizes business value.

Deployment Plan: Once the scale and scope of the effort—and its expected outcomes—are understood, the implementation of marketing operations initiatives begins. High performers spend considerable energy identifying different development and execution scenarios. In addition to modeling the cost/benefit outcomes, high performers consider business goals, risk tolerance, user issues and change management capacity to determine the best build and implement strategy for their organization.

Change Management Plan: One incontrovertible rule of marketing operations initiatives is that no real value can be achieved unless there is a change in behavior among marketing members. Operationally excellent marketing companies put considerable focus on change management. Often high level change planning is part of the marketing road map. High performers have a clearly articulated leadership strategy for supporting change. Their change management plans include communications, training, performance management and post-deployment support programs. High performers ensure they address these critical elements and, thus, maximize the chance that their initiatives will generate true business benefits.