The Friday late morning Spotlight Sessions at Mplanet 2006 allowed attendees to choose from nine different options. Keeping on the Forrester train (I attended Brian Kardon's session yesterday) I selected a session lead by Peter Kim titled, "Reinventing the Marketing Organization". (You can check out Peter's blog at Being PeterKim.com)

The underlying theme of Peter's talk is that customers must be your organizing principle. Many companies say they are customer-centric, but they aren't. What Peter is going to be talking about is creating and managing a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization (CCMO).

Forrester has done significant research to determine if marketing organizations (MO) are broken and there is a consensus that things are broken. One of the issues is that most marketing organizations only control one of the four P's. 76% of organizations they surveyed said that customer service is not under the control of the marketing organization.

New skill sets are required for success. Strategic thinking of course a valued skill but creativity has a diminishing role. In Forrester's analysis there is a cluster of core skills required: Quantitative Analysis, Business Acumen, Financial Analysis. Often though, MO's rely upon other divisions such as IT, HR etc to help fill those gaps.

Product and channel groups are not the answer. In a product-group model there is often a duplication of efforts across the products. On the other hand a channel organization overemphasizes efficiency and lacks the visibility of cross-channel customers. All of these efforts leave the customer with a fractured experience since each option product/channel is separate.

When you think about your media consumption habits, you wake up read the paper, watch some TV, check your e-mail and browse the web on your mobile phone. In each case you're using a different channel which is something that marketers often keep separate, but that's not how the customer looks at things. The customer didn't consciously say, "I want to look at different media channels"...they just did what they do.

Media presence is no longer a given. In the 1960's there was a true mass media with a limited number of channel options. Today there are an overwhelming number of media options. Now there is social computing which has diversified the channels even more.

Alignment based upon products, channels or geography are ineffective. A market structure in which customer alignment is the primary organizing structure.

You look at your customer from a persona or lifestyle perspective, not from a product perspective.

Just like Chris Anderson's session yesterday.....I am getting behind......