Category: Team Structure

In today’s landscape, efficiency should not be a standalone strategy. Get insights into how marketing should structure itself across and within teams here.

Okay, so the full title is actually Team of Teams – New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal U.S. Army Retired with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell.  But do not let this put you off as this is not some war story from a retired warrior.

On a day to day basis how many times do you stop and think about the structure of your marketing team and the impact it’s having on how well you are going to market? Honestly? Yet, with the current situation of ever changing strategic focus coupled with mounting pressures on marketing to do more for less, deliver more tangible business results, become more customer oriented or be more agile, it’s something we at TrinityP3 feel needs to be thought about. Often.

Okay, perhaps not yours Marc, but when you recently stated that you would like three quarters of your agencies to be creative, it made me reflect on the literally hundreds of agency remuneration deals we have benchmarked, negotiated and managed over the past 18 years and the fact that in every case the agency resources required were directly related to the requirements and expectations of the marketers.

It is interesting that when you are talking to business people about marketing, the majority seem to think of marketing in the context of marketing communications, or what was not long ago considered Promotions or Advertising, one of the Ps in what was the 4Ps of marketing. This is probably not surprising as promotions and advertising are certainly the high profile and public end of the marketing process and certainly where a significant component of the budget is spent, especially on paid media, but increasingly on owned and earned media too.

But the fact that many organisations think of marketing as the marketing communications area, leaves the question of where are the other traditional marketing functions located within the organisation? The reason for asking is that often when we are what marketing structure do you have the most common answers are either centralised or decentralised. Only to find out that even when it is centralised it is usually only the marketing communications function that is centralised and typically marketing is actually distributed across the organisation.

Some of the more interesting work we have been undertaking at TrinityP3 in the past five years is designing new marketing structures for our clients. This work arose from the projects where we would restructure their external roster of agencies and suppliers to their strategy, only to have them ask if we could do the same with their internal structure, which they had realised through the process, was often aligned to the business silo structure and not the customer strategy.This work has been done for a wide range of companies and categories including Financial Services, Automotive, Higher Education, Property & Construction and more.Late last year I was interviewed by Lara Sinclair from Simple.HQ on the trends in marketing structures we had observed beyond the centralised and decentralised dichotomy typically seen in the past.

Do silo marketing structures hinder the effectiveness of your agencies? In a nutshell, yes.I have previously written about the negative impact silo structures can have on the function of marketing inside a business and, consequently, its brand. However, left to their own devices, silo structured marketing teams will eventually damage more than just the effectiveness of a business, it will also negatively impact on the effectiveness of your agency.
Why? Because quite simply it’s hard to be effective when you have a fragmented client with competing goals, inconsistent processes and a disjointed approach to client-agency relationships.

Anyone remember this quote from Daniel Defoe’s legendary book, The life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe?
“…I must acknowledge, that, of all the circumstances of life that ever I had any experience of, nothing makes mankind so completely miserable as that of being in constant fear.”The fear refers to the threat of being seen as pirates as the ship that Robinson Crusoe was on landed in a little port called Quinchang. Sorry to start this post with a bit of fear, however, have you experienced a bit of fear in your business life? Have you come across people floating around on their own virtual digital islands?

A silo is a standalone structure that is used to store grain. It has no other purpose other than to store the grain it has inside it and if another type of grain needs to be stored then a separate silo is employed for the task. These silos do not work together – ever, even if one silo is overflowing and the other silo is only half full. Similarly, business silos, be they at an organisational or departmental level, are teams that work within their own boundaries, focused on delivering to their own strategies and objectives and behaving as though all the other silos are a direct threat to their very being.

Firstly I want to be very clear of what we are talking about when we refer to content strategy. Because often content […]