Marketing leaders would never decide to create an organizational structure that operates inefficiently and negatively impacts buyer experience, yet that’s often exactly what happens.
Most marketing organizations believe they have a unified planning process, and technically, they do. Everyone contributes to the annual plan, budgets are allocated, program calendars are built, and milestones are reviewed.
But beneath the surface, subfunctions often continue planning independently. What appears to be a single marketing strategy is actually a collection of disconnected plans targeting the same audiences.
Demand generation launches its programs. Event teams build theirs. Field marketing creates another set. Customer marketing runs separate initiatives. Digital teams manage their own programs. Each effort is typically well intentioned but optimized for its own objectives and disregards the impact on buyers.
The outcome is overlapping communications, duplicated effort, competing priorities, and buyers with a negative brand experience. It creates budget inefficiencies, obscures accountability, and reduces marketing effectiveness.
The uncomfortable truth is that many organizations don’t have a messaging problem, a content problem, or even a channel problem. They have a coordination problem.
The Good News: This Doesn’t Require Reorganization
When marketing leaders recognize the problem, many assume the solution requires a major organizational redesign. It doesn’t. One of the most practical findings in Forrester’s research is that organizations do not need to dismantle existing marketing teams or create new reporting structures. Instead, they need to change how planning and audience management occur.
The answer is to move from program-centric planning to audience-centric orchestration across all program types, remaining agnostic to which team is running the program. This approach to program planning forces marketing teams to prioritize. When every program must align to a defined business objective and audience segment, it becomes much harder to justify launching another disconnected program simply because a team has budget or capacity.
This shift may sound subtle, but in practice, it’s transformational. It’s the most practical marketing performance catalyst you’re not discussing.
Forrester clients can explore more in the report Marketing Program Proliferation Hurts Customer Experience And Limits Business Growth. Schedule a guidance session to discuss how your organization can better define and evolve marketing’s purpose.
