What do all great marketing teams have in common? Why do some organisations seem to continue delivering great, impactful, memorable marketing time after time? And how do they seem to continuously, confidently understand what value they are creating, how they are creating it, and how it can be improved? Great teams all prioritise the same four ways of working. The sum of successfully executing these is an operating model for the Marketing function. An intentional, consistent, effective way for how the Marketing team delivers marketing and how it creates business value.

Data-driven marketing is the dream, right? There is a truth behind the idea that providing you’re doing something based upon logic and data, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing something that’s actually useful. The unfortunate reality is that it’s not ‘good career management’ to present performance data with margins of error and a talk track that says “...it’s possible that literally nothing resulted from millions of dollars spent.”

The only way to truly understand what works, what is strong, what is reliable is to understand the how. How was it built, how was it tested, how was it designed. Under what range of conditions does this theory hold up and where does it fall down? Magic may spark great ideas. But science is about testing ideas to understand how they work.

There is an endemic failure within marketing to understand what is really happening. Marketing teams misjudge the value of their work, misrepresent their impact and thus misalign their resources. Marketing leaders think in terms of their domain: what impact did I drive? They buy wins for their domain with their budgets and headcount without understanding how they really fit into a wider value chain for customers.

Unintentional, avoidable waste that comes from mistakes, inefficiencies, failure to ask the right questions and poor quality control. These are all drains on delivering value. How effectively teams work together will determine how much waste they produce. Everyone should dislike the burden of waste because it is the opposite of what we should all turn up and work to deal with and adds nothing to the pleasure from our home lives.

For marketing to be a value centre it must be able to make strategic investments that ultimately and perhaps indirectly, deliver revenue. In other words, marketing must be able to quantify the value it delivers. With quantification comes optimisation, waste reduction, elevation and acceleration, such that the role of the marketing leader is to drive maximum value from the budget available in the fastest, most efficient manner.

A data-driven approach to marketing requires a scientific approach to understanding what is really happening and how specific is too specific in the way you present data. Testing crazy ideas is just as much a part of science as it is magic. Believing crazy ideas because you want them to be true is alchemy.

For years the goal of enterprise marketing has been the same: perfect segmentation, personalisation and activation at scale. Many of the imperfections of the marketing world can be explained by the importance of demonstrating value. Marketing is, after all, a commercial environment. It is easier to get promoted by complementing the Emperor than by pointing out he has no clothes.

Sales and Marketing teams are like siblings – they need each other, but they may not choose each other as friends and they sometimes argue. Marketing is a Brand and Sales efficiency engine. Marketing needs to be out ahead of Sales building brand, creating markets, defining position and creating opportunities and working alongside Sales to accelerate and close them at scale. If Marketing teams cannot see how they are driving organisational efficiency for Sales, they should question their long-term value.

In the aftermath of World War 2, few could have predicted the powerhouse that Japanese manufacturing would become. To compete, Japanese industry needed to operate differently and within its own strengths and constraints. The constraints of low cash, low demand and low space for large factories were recalibrated, and by investing in process value rather than volume Toyota were able to develop an entirely lean operating model. Take a sideways look at the Toyota forms of waste and you’ll see the same types of waste that most marketing organisations accept every day.

If you want to know why marketing that works, works, and why so much doesn’t here’s the answer: because it spends time on its ‘why’ and its ‘how’ rather than just on its ‘what’. It understands that success is inception aligned to the customer’s purchase process and the sales methodology, and because it operationalises delivery of that as one marketing organisation at scale. Not because it can come up with creative concepts or uses cool technology.