Despite years of mounting pressure within many marketing organizations between centralizing or decentralizing resources, a rapidly growing number of marketing leaders now prefer the centralized approach, according to
"Marketing leaders have long been chasing the 'perfect' marketing organizational structure, hoping that the right one will help them realize greater value and scale from their organizations," said
Resources that may have been decentralized to regions or other organizational entities are also being consolidated and centralized. This is consistent with findings from the
This reallocation of resources is contributing to fully centralized models where all marketing staff operate as a centralized entity or primarily centralized models where most marketing staff are centralized with limited staff distributed to regions or business units. Gartner research also shows that marketing organizations with a marketing operations leader are more likely to have a fully centralized structure (35%) versus those without a marketing operations leader (23%).
"The organizational commitment to placing a marketing operations leader indicates a meaningful investment in the marketing operations function," said
Gartner recommends that marketing leaders looking to adopt a centralized structure take the following actions:
- Pursue the effectiveness and scale of a more centralized organization. Evaluate the current state of their organization and where it falls on a centralization continuum. If the organization is more decentralized, identify explicitly why a decentralized structure is justified and begin work to evaluate where there are opportunities for greater centralization.
- Explore current organizational evolution and resource patterns that may be organically driving centralization. This may include the creation of shared service or center of excellence teams that serve the organization more broadly. Leveraging existing organizational momentum toward centralization can ease the transition from a decentralized model.
- Assess the marketing governance and control risks to the business based on the organization's current model. More decentralized models where more entities and individuals have greater autonomy can also create additional organizational risk.
The full report is available to Gartner for Marketers clients here: "Marketing Organization Survey 2020: The Evolution to Centralized, Functional and Agile Continues."
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