The most common reason marketing underperforms has nothing to do with creativity. It has nothing to do with talent, or technology, or even budget (although budget often gets the blame). The real reason is simpler and more structural than any of those things. Most marketing teams are set up to fail before they even start any work.

I’ve worked in and with marketing functions of almost every size and type: global enterprises, scale-ups, agencies, consultancies, nonprofits. And the pattern I see repeated, regardless of sector or organisation size, is this: talented people, working hard, in a function that lacks the foundations to convert that effort into consistent, measurable results.

Structure is not a glamorous topic. It doesn’t generate the same energy as a new campaign, a rebrand, or a technology platform. But without it, none of those things deliver what they should.

What does under-structuring actually look like in practice? It looks like a team where roles and accountabilities are loosely defined, so ownership of outcomes is shared by everyone and owned by no one. It looks like a planning process that begins with channels and tactics rather than goals and customer models, producing a calendar of activity rather than a strategy. It looks like reporting that measures what’s easy to measure rather than what’s important to know. And it looks like a data infrastructure that is either absent or so fragmented that nobody trusts the numbers enough to act on them.

Gartner’s most recent CMO survey found that 64% of marketing leaders say they lack the budget to execute their strategy. That’s a striking number, but a more striking number sits alongside it: just 30% of marketers rate their own organisation’s marketing as genuinely effective. In other words, the problem isn’t just one of resource, it’s one of foundation.

The reason leadership tolerates this is understandable, if frustrating. Structure feels like bureaucracy. In a fast-moving environment, process and governance sound like the enemy of agility and creativity. So organisations invest in people, technology and campaigns, but not in the operating model that would make all of those investments work harder.

The paradox is that structure is precisely what enables creativity. When roles are clear, people can focus. When the planning process is disciplined, teams make better decisions about where to spend their energy. When measurement frameworks are in place, they learn quickly from what isn’t working and double down on what is. Creativity without structure produces bursts of activity. Creativity with structure produces sustained performance.

A properly structured marketing function isn’t complicated, but it does require a few non-negotiables. It needs a clear planning cadence that connects to the business planning cycle, not a separate process running in parallel with no commercial anchor. It needs defined roles with genuine accountability for outcomes, not just outputs. It needs a data baseline (an honest picture of where the business is now) before any forward-looking plan is built. And it needs a measurement framework that was designed before the activity started, not retrofitted afterwards to make the results look better than they are.

None of that is radical. All of it is rare.

If you want to know whether your marketing function is structurally sound, ask yourself these four questions.

• Do we have a clear owner for each significant marketing outcome?
• Does our planning process start with a financial goal and work backwards?
• Do we have a data baseline we trust?
• Were our success metrics defined before this year’s activity began?

If the answer to any of those is no, or not really, then it’s more than likely you have a structural issue in your team, or at least the beginning of one.

Citations

1. Gartner CMO Survey 2024: marketing budgets at 7.7% of revenue; 64% of CMOs lack budget; only 30% rate marketing as effective. Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2024 (May 2024) https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-13-gartner-cmo-survey-reveals-marketing-budgets-have-dropped-to-seven-point-seven-percent-of-overall-company-revenue-in-2024