By Justin Chatigny, CMO
Justin serves as PlatinumBlack’s CMO and is responsible for both the day-to-day operations of PlatinumBlack and for ensuring that its strategy, marketing, and creative output delivers on client objectives. He has over 25 years of experience helping companies grow and has served in numerous marketing, business development, and consulting capacities in that time. Before taking on his current role at PlatinumBlack, Justin was a Director on Accenture’s Global Marketing Strategy team and held senior marketing leadership positions at Grant Thornton and Deloitte.
There are many characteristics common to high-performing marketing organizations. In my work at Accenture, Grant Thornton, and Deloitte, I had the opportunity to observe these firsthand—often from inside the organization—while helping executive teams evolve their marketing functions to better support growth. What follows here is a select list of some of those attributes. Some may be self-evident. Others may challenge how you think. I’ve framed them at a high level because they apply broadly, whatever the industry.
These aren’t surface-level observations about one-off campaigns. Instead, they reflect deeper structural, cultural, and operational qualities that enable high-performing marketing teams to scale with purpose, get to market with speed, and deliver meaningful business impact.
Effective marketing organizations, of any size, have a clearly defined strategy that aligns with the overall strategy and objectives of the business. With the help of their marketing teams, these businesses know who they are and what unique value they offer to the market and their customers (market positioning); they know who they serve (defined target audience); they know their strengths and weaknesses; and they deliver their products and services accordingly.
While every marketing organization acknowledges the importance of differentiation, the most effective marketing organizations are maniacal about distinction.
Their strategies have teeth and are accompanied by action. They seek to build a moat around themselves and stand isolated from their competitive field. They intentionally alienate or upset certain markets or sectors (and internal stakeholders) because they are so resolutely focused on what it is that sets them apart.
The most effective marketing leaders go to great lengths to ensure their team—not just their leadership team—deeply understands their strategy.
Teams I’ve been a part of had consistent, standing “All Hands Calls” to share marketing priorities for the organization and understand what the CEO is focused on. Others used internal newsletters, town halls, and collaborative planning sessions to reinforce strategic goals and highlight how individual work ladders up to broader business objectives. These meetings create space for feedback and dialogue, ensuring strategy isn’t just communicated—it’s internalized and owned across the team.
Effective strategy isn’t a slide deck—it’s a narrative.
Prose forces an advanced level of critical thinking and the laying out of arguments and rationale in an analytical, fact-based manner. Famously, Amazon uses a written, 6-page memo (rather than PPT) to explain a topic or project in narrative format that is focused on facts and facilitates decision making. In so doing, its marketing organization ensures that its strategy is defensible, sound, and made available for widespread understanding.
Insights fuel strategy—and sound strategy is predicated on deep customer understanding.
High-performing marketing organizations establish processes, tools, and investments that yield a steady stream of customer insights. Innumerable platforms and tools exist for this purpose: Statista, Brandwatch, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, and Meltwater, to name a few. From social listening to market research, from behavioral data to direct customer feedback, they create feedback loops that inform messaging, shape campaigns, and sharpen positioning. Direct conversations with customers are critical to the development of a brand’s market positioning. The result is smarter targeting, more resonant messaging, and a marketing engine that adapts in real time to market shifts and audience needs.
The most successful marketing organizations are led by business-savvy marketers who invest deeply in people, partnerships, and performance.
Top marketing leaders are as much businesspeople as they are marketers.
Beyond customer understanding and attunement to business initiatives, they are deliberate in knowing the details of their company’s operational and financial machinations. It not only makes them more effective marketers, but also helps position them as strategic business advisors within their organization. To this end, they build solid relationships with functional leaders (e.g., CIOs, CFOs) and actively identify ways to help them further their own initiatives.
These marketing leaders surround themselves with top talent and prioritize recruiting to become a destination for it.
They also “hire for the horizon” to acquire skills not just for today, but for what it will take to get to tomorrow. Once in the door, they empower and reward that talent; they invest in that talent (training and continuous learning programs like IBM’s “Marketing Academy”); they elevate their visibility with influential internal stakeholders; and they champion their career growth inside and outside of the organization.
Great marketing leaders are external community builders.
They recognize the need to establish a cohort of knowledgeable, trustworthy, and committed marketing leaders from whom they can learn and with whom they can share and test ideas. Formal groups exist for this purpose, including the CMO Alliance and Deloitte’s CMO Academy, among others. But leading CMOs are not shy about reaching out directly to those who are doing work they admire, getting involved in judging marketing work, taking an active role in trade organizations, or participating on relevant boards.
At the heart of every leading marketing organization is a relentless drive to innovate. But it’s not innovation for innovation’s sake—it’s grounded in strategy.
Top marketing teams are at the forefront of AI and tech adoption.
They’re constantly testing new tools and conceiving of new use cases to drive efficiency and effectiveness with it. These teams are continuously optimizing their technology stacks from automation tools to CRM, to intent-based technology, and beyond. While marketing technology is universally acknowledged as essential, deep integration remains elusive. While so many companies struggle with achieving the promise of true MarTech integration, the most successful ones persist and prioritize finding emergent solutions that help deliver on it.
A “test and learn” culture is essential to ongoing optimization of marketing performance.
It is, however, often relegated to the tactical and mundane (this image vs. that image) rather than being a committed ethos that yields riskier, bolder action—one that genuinely accommodates and encourages failures. Consequently, in too many organizations of size, test and learn often provides for incremental improvements rather than a notable shift in performance and results. Any idea great enough to yield a quantum leap for a brand and make a massive impact is going to feel risky because the best campaigns provoke action. Marketing leaders need to stand up (and maybe put their neck on the line a little) for audacity because the easiest thing to do is water down a campaign until there’s nothing left of interest about it.
High-performing marketing teams prize speed-to-market over perfection.
Critically, they avoid the trap of universal stakeholder vetting / approvals. They disavow the typical “thought leadership” tome that may take 6 months to get to market in favor of rapid and regular quick-to-market content. They get to market at speed and course correct as needed. They give the market, rather than internal stakeholders, more credence in determining what is successful and what works. For these marketers, the enemy is work that requires substantial resources, but which never sees the light of day.
Leading marketing organizations still see human creativity as marketing’s oxygen and a driver of distinction, preference, and innovation.
Award-winning campaigns from companies like Nike, Dove, LinkedIn, SAP, and Geico (see the latest B2B and B2C awards from Cannes Lions) prove the importance of human touch, emotional storytelling, and humor in connecting with audiences and moving them to purchase. Leading marketing organizations understand that while AI can scale content and speed up production, it can’t replicate the nuance, originality, or emotional intelligence of the human mind.
In world-class marketing teams, data drives decisions, accountability, and clarity about what’s working and where to go next.
Performance marketing is uppermost in the minds of top marketing executives, which can have a disproportionate focus on marketing’s down funnel impact.
So focused are CMOs and their teams on leads, sales, and Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), that an unhelpful debate has emerged between “brand marketers” and “performance marketers,” as if the two are at odds. While the need to tie marketing performance / metrics to business performance is self-evident, leading marketing organizations keep it simple. Though they are loathe to subject executives to voluminous dashboards of data, they are less concerned about drowning their team in them. A handful of well-chosen metrics provides more insight—and more alignment—than a dashboard full of noise.
Great marketing teams are quite comfortable with making investments in their brands that are not measured with precision against financial impact.
Yes, ROI and ROMI matter. But it’s more nuanced. Top teams are happy to give (at least some) content away for “free” without a gate for measurement—they are more interested in generating goodwill with their audience and being visible even without a measurable impact. Increasingly, great marketing teams (and their fellow executives) recognize that significant traffic and value comes from “dark social,” sources where direct attribution is more challenging (e.g., forums, word of mouth, events, podcasts).
Everyone in the marketing organization needs to live in data, so the results need to be transparent, readily available, and democratized.
Top organizations provide self-service tools to satisfy the reporting needs of different stakeholders across geographies / departments to allow marketers around the globe to access, segment, and analyze data on demand. It not only creates consistency in reporting, which is particularly important in an organization of its scale, but it also helps the team elevate its data literacy and encourages fact-based decision making.
Speed isn’t just a competitive advantage at top marketing organizations—it’s a necessity. These teams are designed from the inside out to move fast, with streamlined processes, clear roles, and a culture that prioritizes action over perfection.
Leading marketing organizations have clear, accessible documentation detailing how the team operates.
Larger, complex marketing organizations need clarity of processes and roles and responsibilities (RACI documents) to function efficiently and enhance the cross-functional collaboration so critical to success. It’s easier said than done, so leading teams incorporate it into new hire onboarding and are committed to providing ongoing and on demand training to ensure that the particulars of their operations are well understood and regularly optimized / enhanced.
Leading teams have a process, but emphasize the principles (e.g., empowered decision making, operate with speed, collaborate across functions).
Process is important, but people often get lost in the details: “Principles over process.” The best marketing organizations recognize that process should serve progress—not stall it. They create just enough structure to ensure clarity and accountability, but they’re careful not to let over-engineering slow momentum. In these cultures, speed and clarity win out over perfection and analysis paralysis.
In keeping with the notion of “test and learn is best learned in the market,” a team’s organizational structure should facilitate speed to market.
While collaboration and consensus building are important, too much stymies progress and erodes market visibility and constant contact and connection with audiences. Quality matters, to be sure, but too many marketing organizations lose momentum and miss opportunities because of internal gyrations and/or pedantic adjustments rather than operating with a bias for getting to market. A fundamental principle of high-performing marketing organizations is that they are built for speed and agility, which is predicated on clear decision-making authority, empowerment, and culture (which celebrates action over circular, endless contemplation).
High-performing marketing organizations don’t operate solely within the confines of their own walls—they engage outside partners and third parties.
Since no one has all the answers, marketing leaders at large organizations often look to connect with likeminded peers for shared insight. Structured moments for outside collaboration—whether through planning sessions, creative reviews, or strategy workshops—often spark new ideas and drive innovation.
Leading marketing organizations are deliberate in their use of variable resources to contain costs while still moving quickly.
Rather than overstaffing internally, they often rely on trained contract talent to handle periods of peak demand. These temporary team members are equipped, supported, and given meaningful work—ensuring they remain engaged and productive. This is a model that allows teams to scale without sacrificing speed or quality.
Streamlining budgets and decision making allows for more speed and attention to priorities.
When marketing budgets are centralized, teams can move faster and stay focused on what matters. In many companies, business units individually fund and direct marketing efforts—leading to duplication, inefficiencies, and misaligned priorities. High-performing organizations flip the model: they give control of marketing spend to the marketing team itself. This shift ensures clearer prioritization and more cohesive execution across the business.
Change is unrelenting. Whether it’s AI and tech or market shifts or industry consolidation or competitive pressures, every marketing company in every industry faces this reality. The best marketing organizations don’t just accept change; they build for it and embrace it. They understand the principle of the Sigmoid Curve: that growth eventually plateaus, and the optimal time to reinvent is not when performance declines, but when you're at your peak.
Marketing organizations in every company should be leaders, not laggards, in change management.
Customer-centricity necessitates change management. Having the acumen and foresight to lead in adapting to digital transformation requires change management. Successful change management requires clear and consistent communication—communication being a hallmark of effective marketing departments. IKEA, T-Mobile, and Amazon are all examples of organizations whose marketing teams lead in change management, primarily because they have their finger on the pulse of customer wants and needs.
Leading marketing teams always pursue different, creative ways to progress toward their strategic north star.
They change not for change’s sake, but because customer preferences shift and markets shift, and emerging technologies never stop emerging. And because crowded markets with perpetually distracted audiences require it. Leading marketers get bored of their own work and pursue new campaigns, new tactics, new partnerships, and new investments to tell their story (even if the story itself remains largely static).
There’s no single blueprint for building a world-class marketing organization—but the best share common traits. They’re sharp on strategy, bold in execution, grounded in data, and wired for speed and change. They don’t just keep pace with the business—they help lead it forward.
