People Power: The Human Side Of Marketing Effectiveness

We recently published a process-driven guide to improving marketing efficiency. A significant part of the discussion didn’t fit into that guide. It’s all to do with culture and teams – the human aspect of efficient and effective marketing operations.

Culture and team structure are essential components of lasting strategic change. Processes matter, but people make them work.  By enabling autonomy and collaboration, and uniting teams behind customer-centric goals, you can achieve something you previously thought was impossible: positive cultural change.

Culture Change in Marketing: Worth the Effort?

Let’s be honest, changing hearts and minds is hard. Harder than reworking processes or resetting KPIs. 

Gartner found that almost 40% of a CMO’s budget goes to change and transformation. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Culture change is as important as process optimisations in improving marketing effectiveness, if not more so. 

A unified, customer-centric culture is what makes good processes stick. It’s the link between strategic goals and everyday operations. It’s a seedbed for innovation, continuous improvement, and sustained business growth. And it’s your only hope of coming through this period of AI-powered disruption with your team (and sanity) intact.thout a goal.

Putting Cultural Change Into Context

By “culture”, we don’t mean intangible qualities. We’re talking about very real things that leaders can influence. Like how people collaborate, communicate, set targets, manage projects, and view customers. Done well, these all feed a “culture” of customer centricity.

Using this (admittedly narrow) definition, changing hearts and minds goes from being abstract to achievable.

At Tap CXM, we regularly say that effective customer experience management (CXM) requires people, process, data, technology, and strategy working together. Culture spans all of these but is rooted in people. It takes real people to affect real changes.

Rethinking Team Structures to Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Good process design only delivers results if teams are set up to work effectively. Team structure (you might call it organisational design) is where strategy and operations meet.

Strong marketing functions are built on clarity, collaboration, and connection, with everyone clear on their part in the bigger picture. That often means:

• Resetting KPIs to focus on customer outcomes.

Customers don’t behave along departmental lines. People are more effective when they understand how their roles link to customer outcomes, rather than how their role exists within rigid departmental boundaries. We’ve talked about this in detail in our customer intelligence playbook.

• Challenging the value of traditional hierarchies.

Modern CXM “departments” are increasingly likely to be cross-functional squads. These squads unite creative, technology, analytics, and delivery functions, aligning them towards customer value goals. The mix changes depending on the goal. Sometimes you’ll see legal, IT, HR, or even a C-Suite representative on the squad, depending on what helps to deliver the best customer experience.

• Reorganising your org chart.

There’s no one right way to organise a business. It depends on your people, skills, tools and resources, business strategy, and ultimately your goals. What we’ve outlined below isn’t an org chart, but a way to start thinking about the teams and principles you need. You’ll need to decide on the exact roles and where they live.

We’ll talk more about orchestration and organising into squads or Centres of Excellence a little later. For now, keep a question in the back of your mind: “Is my org chart arranged around the customer’s needs?”

Autonomy and Alignment

Autonomy and alignment have traditionally been seen as opposite ends of a spectrum. But a more recent “Aligned Autonomy” theory puts them on separate axes.

Autonomy gives teams a clear, customer-centric goal and the freedom to make decisions about the best way to achieve it. Alignment ensures that while they’re moving fast, they’re still moving in the same direction as other squads.

The best organisations score high on both.

In mature organisations, teams self-govern while staying connected to shared goals. Trust is crucial. Especially when you’re trying to do things that few others have done. That’s why you need to mature your CXM approach on both axes. Autonomy without alignment breeds chaos. Alignment without autonomy kills innovation.

Servant Leadership

Instead of directing from on high, servant leaders enable their team to make decisions. This comes from the idea that one person at the top doing all the thinking is a bottleneck and a risk. It’s more efficient and effective for the people closest to the information to make decisions.

In practice, that looks like replacing directives with destinations, instructions with intent, and orders with objectives.

This might mean that people go about things in a different way than you would. Good. Your job isn’t to think for everyone. You should be a sounding board. A sense check. The rest of your role is to supply people with what they need to achieve the objectives you’ve set. 

Once people are empowered and supported, they’ll start thinking for themselves, they’ll collaborate more, and they’ll develop better ways of working that improve marketing effectiveness across every measurable dimension.

Former US Navy Captain and author of “Turn the Ship Around”, David Marquet, exemplifies how effective leaders bring this all together. Check out a video illustrating (literally) some of his core ideas here or watch a longer talk here.

Marketing Effectiveness and Efficiency in Practice

At some point, all these great ideas meet reality. This is where organisations need to think about the practical way to improve efficiency and effectiveness without burning everything down and starting over, or blowing up the budget by going on a hiring spree.

Reality can be a bit of a bummer:

• You probably can’t afford to hire enough specialists to fill squads. You’ll need to share expertise.
• You still need centralised oversight to maintain brand consistency and messaging.
• Stuff is expensive. Not every squad will get the tech, systems, or people they ask for.
• While customer success can be distributed out to all teams, some functions might not be so easy to decentralise.

That’s why our organisational diagram above includes an efficiency layer (in light blue). These are practicalities like shared services and central support functions. They’re needed to make sure things are working.

Centres of Excellence

One of the smartest moves we’re seeing from enterprise and global brands is setting up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for customer engagement. We’ve helped Colliers, Arup, and a global pharmaceutical company (among others) establish versions of this model. 

Think of it as air traffic control for customer experiences. Customer-centric, cross-departmental squads coordinate with a CoE. Instead of squads building every experience or campaign from the ground up, the CoE provides templates, assets, and playbooks informed by best practices. 

There are several benefits:

• More cost-efficient. 
• Reduces duplication. 
• Speeds up time to market.
• Maintains standards across markets and channels.
• Delivers consistent experiences.
• Supports borderless business.
• Enables squads to share, learn, and improve.

A CoE doesn’t replace creativity at the squad level. It doesn’t squash autonomy, in other words. It enables it by making sure the heavy lifting is already done, best practices are in place, and squads have approved resources ready to go on demand.

Marketing Efficiency is a Culture, Not a Project

Efficiency and effectiveness in marketing are about building a culture where:

• Everyone is aligned to a customer-centric goal.
• Teams have autonomy to make decisions.
• Leaders support, they don’t dictate. 
• People’s time and energy are protected.

Getting there is not one big transformation. It comes from the daily discipline of making the right way the easy way.

Over time, if they’re done well, these culture change initiatives give people the space to do their best work. They free teams from unnecessary bureaucracy, align them behind customer-centric goals that drive business growth, and empower them to make better decisions.

When that happens, CXM becomes an unstoppable growth engine.

This guide is part of our in-depth series on designing and optimising customer journeys. You can download our comprehensive Customer Journey Playbook now to read more.