Stop Organising Your Marketing Around Channels

Most marketing organisations are still structured around channels. There is a paid media team, a CRM team, a social team, a content team, an SEO team and often several other specialist functions sitting alongside them. That structure is tidy internally, but it does not reflect how customers experience the brand.

Customers do not think in channels. They move between search, social, email, websites, stores, sales conversations and recommendations without caring which team owns each interaction. When the organisation is built around channels, the customer journey is fragmented before the work even begins.

The problem becomes more pronounced as AI reduces the technical barriers between disciplines. Many capabilities that once required deep channel specialism are becoming easier to access. That makes the organisational question more important: should marketing continue to be built around where activity happens, or around the customer and commercial outcomes the business is trying to create?

Organise around outcomes, not execution

A better model is to organise teams around problems such as acquisition, retention, category growth, customer value or specific audience needs. Channels then become tools that those teams use, rather than organisational territories that need to be defended.

This changes the nature of accountability. A retention team is responsible for improving customer value, not simply for increasing email engagement. A growth team is accountable for profitable customer acquisition, not for maximising paid media performance. The discussion moves from channel metrics towards business outcomes.

Specialist expertise still matters, of course. The objective is not to remove channel experts, but to place their expertise inside a broader commercial system. Specialists should help solve customer and growth problems rather than allowing the organisation chart to dictate the strategy.

Break the incentives that create silos

Channel structures often create competing incentives. Each team has its own budget, targets and reporting, which naturally encourages people to optimise their part of the system. The paid media team wants more paid media. The CRM team wants more CRM activity. The social team wants greater investment in social.

The result can be local optimisation at the expense of overall effectiveness. Channels that are easy to measure receive more investment, while activities that influence demand across several touchpoints struggle to demonstrate ownership of the outcome.

CMOs should design structures and incentives that reward collective performance instead. The role of the marketing organisation is not to make every channel successful. It is to create demand, acquire customers, build preference and increase the value of the customer base. The structure should follow those objectives, not the platforms used to achieve them.