Here’s what you can learn from them:
Promote systemic thinking
The traditional impulse to assign resources to specific activities yields the silos everyone decries yet perpetuates. It’s like a team where each player focuses on their near-term component results. Leaders see marketing systemically. They build teams in balance so that insights, creativity, commercial, digital, brand and measurement own their skills but embrace the full marketing continuum. What’s more, their teams build coalitions across the organization with other pillars such as product, distribution, service and finance.
Set one goal
It sounds obvious, yet many companies don’t translate their financial goals into specific roles for corporate, brand and digital teams. Leaders now follow one compass to where the company needs to be in the market. So, they set business KPIs with a clear view of immediate and sustained business outcomes and how individual activities connect to them.
The contribution of marketing, brand and digital teams is human-centered. They focus on breaking or reinforcing a habit or perception to change the behavior of human beings so they can deliver new customers while keeping and getting more value from current ones.
This customer-centered mindset is the foundation for setting up powerful measurement systems of leading and lagging metrics. Leaders look at the scale of change needed and how activities deliver that incremental growth over the course of a year, not just within a month. That allows scenario planning and agility when things change (everyone is grounded in the whole). It clarifies the impact of overall marketing investment, which creates the basis for stronger CMO-CFO relationships (another advantage within market leaders). And it prevents the company from having to break stride and reset every six to 12 months as competitors do.