Challenge

A Marketing Organization focused on Product Management needed to be transformed to a function that could provide direction to the manufacturer's efforts to meet rapidly evolving market needs

"We made several unsuccessful attempts to realign and restructure marketing, but we needed a fresh perspective on how to evolve a successful marketing function to support our growth."

VP of Sales and Marketing, Snacks Manufacturing Company

Proposal

A Snacks Manufacturing Company had struggled to build an effective marketing function for several years. Marketing, in the absence of a strong organization, had become a fragmented function with many traditional marketing activities conducted by other departments such as Sales and Business Development. The snacks market had been evolving rapidly and considerable uncertainty existed as to the future direction of the market. Accordingly, the manufacturer needed to develop a strong marketing function to guide future product development and roadmapping to meet the evolving needs of the market.

The current marketing organization performed well in managing the existing product lines, but struggled with capturing the "voice of the customer" and providing directional insight to ensure that products evolved to meet the fast-changing needs of the market. Additionally, senior leadership had little visibility into the performance of marketing which diminished the credibility of Marketing.

Outcome

The results of Business Unlimited's recommendations led to:

• A roadmap for the Marketing organization that guided near and long-term initiatives with a focus on improving "Voice of the Customer" and product lifecycle planning

• Realignment of workflow resulting in a productivity improvement equal to 2 FTEs without having to add headcount in the marketing organization

• Improved Marketing ROI by creating a Marketing Analytics organization staffed with lower cost resources with specialized analytical skills

• Improved coordination across functions through increased visibility of departmental activities and overlapping projects