After 13 years helping some of the world’s leading companies transform their marketing, I’ve come to a fairly simple conclusion.
Most marketing transformation programmes don’t fail because the strategy was bad, the technology wrong, the agencies poor, or the org design ill-conceived.
They fail because organisations underestimate how many moving parts need to change together, and the best way to orchestrate transformation
We’ve had a ringside seat on hundreds of transformation projects; some have created genuine growth engines for businesses and others have consumed huge amounts of time, money and energy and never quite delivered what was promised.
And when you look closely, the same failure patterns appear again and again.
The first is poor objectives.
What exactly are you trying to achieve?
You’d be surprised how many programmes begin without a clear definition of success.
Second, leadership alignment.
If senior stakeholders aren’t genuinely aligned on the destination, the priorities and the trade-offs required to get there, the programme starts pulling itself apart long before it reaches the finish line.
Third, poor communication.
People support what they understand.
Teams, agencies, markets and technology users need to know why change is happening, what it means for them and what happens next.
Fourth, a lack of integration.
This is probably the biggest lesson we’ve learned. You will need to change skills AND org design AND processes AND technology AND data AND your agency scopes and capabilities AND quite possibly elements of your marketing culture
Everything is connected.
Yet many organisations still try to fix one piece in isolation.
Fifth, undervaluing process.
Too many companies focus on Org Design or Tech but Ways or Working and Process is the bridge between strategy and execution.
Without it, everything else struggles.
Sixth, poor business planning.
Many organisations underestimate investment requirements while overestimating the speed of benefits.
I remember one programme where we identified a pathway to deliver around $60 million in value over three years.
The investment required was approximately $1.5 million in the first year.
The benefits were approved. The investment wasn’t.
The maths never worked after that.
Seventh, weak change management.
This is where many otherwise good programmes come unstuck. Who is accountable for change management, is it scoped and budgeted?
Without great change management, programmes die.
And finally, culture.
Ignore culture at your peril.
A motivated, collaborative and confident marketing organisation can achieve extraordinary things.
A disengaged one can quietly resist even the best-designed transformation.
So, in summary, the marketing transformation programmes that succeed recognise that marketing is a system.
And systems only change when you have an integrated plan that brings together strategy, technology, data, process, people, agencies, governance and culture.
Get that right and transformation becomes much easier.
I’d be interested to hear your experiences.
What have you seen make marketing transformation succeed – or fail?
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