Data Drives New Organizational Structure, Says SAS Marketing SVP
It’s not news that data and analytics have drastically changed the practice of marketing over the past several years. But they’ve also changed marketers themselves, according to Adele Sweetwood, SVP of global marketing for SAS.
It’s not news that data and analytics have drastically changed the practice of marketing over the past several years. But they’ve also changed marketers themselves, according to Adele Sweetwood, SVP of global marketing for SAS. Her new book, “The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform your Marketing Organization,” describes the changes in her marketing department and those of other companies. “It has a lot of different voices and stories of what we did, why we did it, how we did it, and what we did wrong,” she said.
“What I’ve seen as the most significant difference,” she continued, “is the way marketing departments are structured in order to manage the change.” Traditionally, marketers would rely on a dedicated data group to handle all of the analysis, while today they are empowered with data at their fingertips. At SAS, every executive and marketer has access to the same dashboards and looks at the same reports.
Eliminating siloes like that extends to other areas as well. Companies used to build a group around each new channel—Web ads, email, search, etc. “We redesigned our structural models to leverage the skill sets of specialization,” Sweetwood said, “but not in an isolated way.” To do so, she set up a shared service model that correlated to a set of go-to-market teams. They’re now in the process of rolling out that model globally.
Highlights from this week’s Marketing Superstars podcast include:
- How marketing’s transformation to a data-driven discipline affects the structure of marketing departments (3:05)
- How organizations evolve to cope with not only new data but also the new channels that generate it (8:52)
- What marketers should look for in new hires to deal with the data revolution (10:18)
- Setting objectives, holding people accountable, and changing mindsets: how to manage an organizational transformation (15:23)
- Globalization vs. regionalization: what works everywhere and what doesn’t (20:07)
- The need for everyone in the organization to have access to the same data tools and use them consistently (22:09)
Click here to listen to previous episodes of Marketing Superstars.