Reviewing Your Marketing Department: The New Four Ps
By Justin Gioia

Raise your hand (or it’s okay to nod so people sitting nearby don’t think you’re weird) if your company has gone through one or more of the following events over the past three years:
- Merger or acquisition
- Digital transformation initiative
- New CEO
- Addition of new business lines
- Significant increase in revenue and earnings growth targets
- Significant expansion of the marketing budget
- Significant dwindling of the marketing budget
- Absolutely no change whatsoever in the marketing budget
- Significant changes by competitors

If you happened to be reading this alongside fellow Marketing leaders, you probably wouldn’t feel so weird raising your hand or nodding because nearly all of them would be doing the same.

And now for the next audience-participation question: Within the past three years, how many of you have conducted a comprehensive review of your Marketing department to assess its ability to accommodate these changes and continue to succeed? If your hand wasn’t raised or your head didn’t nod, you’re not alone. Conducting such a review is not always top of mind, and it’s certainly not easy to do. But for the long-term viability of your department, it is indeed a necessary endeavor.

For those who pursued an MBA or perhaps a degree in Marketing, you likely came across a basic marketing concept known as the Four Ps (product, price, place and promotion). If you remember this, great, but for our purposes here you can forget those Four Ps and get ready to learn a new set of Four Ps to help with your Marketing department review:
1. Purpose
2. Projects
3. People
4. Processes

First P: Purpose
In speaking with Marketing leaders of companies of various sizes and industries during the past 10 years, a consistent refrain is that if you’re going to tackle the assignment of thoroughly reviewing your Marketing department, you first and foremost have to know its Purpose, because this can vary greatly from company to company, even between companies within the same industry.

It’s fair to say there may be multiple objectives driving your department’s Purpose, but if you were to ask executives around your company to describe Marketing’s purpose in the organization, what would they say:
- Revenue driver?
- Brand awareness builder?
- Lead generator?
- Thought leader?
- Customer experience champion?
- Support service?

Once you’ve gathered their answers, determine how closely they match your own response. It’s possible the executives’ answers may differ from what they might have said three years ago to acknowledge the company’s changes. Or their answers may be exactly the same as three years ago in spite of the company’s changes. In either case, it’s better to know their response and be fully aligned than to make assumptions based on outdated thinking.

Once you’ve identified your department’s Purpose, it’s time to move to the second P.

Second P: Projects
Whether you’ve been with your company a few months or several years, your Marketing department likely has several legacy projects or campaigns that have long been on the department planning calendar because – get ready to cringe here – “it’s something we’ve always done.” But as the company has changed and the expectations for Marketing must change along with it, be willing to provide extremely candid answers to the following:

- What are the department’s existing projects, campaigns, initiatives and other efforts?
- How well do these align to Marketing’s current Purpose?
- How does this work support the ideal customer experience?
- What can/should we start, stop or continue to better align firm and Marketing objectives and goals going forward?

While identifying the true answers to these questions is fairly easy, the implementation of those answers is the real challenge. And a big part of that challenge lies in the third P.

Third P: People
Let’s be honest. Conducting a full-blown department review will put many, if not all, of your employees on edge. Whenever you start to mention how the department needs to evaluate the work it’s doing and whether all of it still makes sense to do, your People will become concerned because they feel their projects largely shape their identity, and the reason for their role’s existence becomes threatened.

Assuming you believe your People are the greatest assets of your department, and you’d like to avoid a mass exodus of your talent, make the effort to include them (or at the very least their immediate supervisors) in this department review to get candid feedback on:

- How do we utilize our People?
- How well do we utilize our People?
- How well do our org design and our People’s skills align with firm and Marketing objectives and goals going forward?
- What work is allocated to our People vs. our agency and vendor partners? Why? Where could we shift work internally or externally to generate better results?
- How do we develop our People to improve themselves and their performance?
- How can we grow our People’s skills as media and marketing channels change, customer expectations change, and new roles and responsibilities will be needed in our department?
- When does it make sense for us to recruit external talent to address a skills gap?

Do your best to be thoughtful and patient as you navigate your People through this part of the review. Be open to working with HR partners and change-management experts to plan your approach, especially if job eliminations are forthcoming. And make sure you’re transparent and communicating frequently to minimize anxieties as well as speculation.

This leads us to the final P, and while this word contains nine letters, some of us view it as a four-letter we shouldn’t say out loud.

Fourth P: Processes
Whenever you mention “Processes,” it often evokes eye-rolling, heavy sighs and assorted other body language that suggests getting 100 paper cuts would be more appealing than discussing this topic. But the reality is that good work can’t get done if you don’t have good Processes for how to get it done.

Some Processes may be informal and only known by the one person who’s handling a particular project (generally not a good practice), and some Processes can be excruciatingly detailed and cumbersome, making your people ask “does the work determine the Processes, or do the Processes determine the work?”

When evaluating your Processes, at a minimum you’ll want to ask:
- How do we get work done? And how does this affect our financial and people-time budgets?
- How/where can we be more efficient and effective?
- What could/should we automate?
- What do we truly lose by streamlining our Processes? What are the benefits and risks?
- What impact do our Processes have on our ability to deliver on our Marketing objectives and goals?

We all recognize the business landscape is constantly changing. As Marketing leaders, we must show our ability to regularly adjust to these changes to maintain our relevance and continue to deliver high-end results.

Justin Gioia has led marketing, customer segment and communications functions for several multi-billion dollar companies in the financial services, energy and biotech areas. He currently is looking for his next marketing leadership challenge.