The Marketing Department of the Future

During the IT-boom at the turn of the millennium, marketing professionals and IT professionals were very much in demand. A new digital world had been opened and this represented a huge unexplored blue ocean where first movers could get a considerable market share. A couple of years later the confidence within media and marketing weakened. Marketing was questioned and faced an increasing demand to show ROI. The value of marketing was difficult to prove and marketing managers lost influence on top management decisions in many organizations.

In the middle of the 2010:s new signals emerged: Marketing departments were gaining power and together with IT had obtained a more important role. According to IT-managers we recently interviewed, the marketing departments also started to gain a bigger influence on the IT departments’ budget priorities. Gartner even predicted that in 2017, CMO:s would have bigger IT-budgets than CIO:s.

In the light of consumer power, and the transformation of the media arena and emerging disruptive business models we made a survey to examine the future of the marketing department more closely. The study was carried out in May/June 2015 and the results are based on 180 respondents.