Where will Brand Managers go?

This afternoon I received my print edition of Advertising Age at work.  I sat down to skim the headlines and noticed a big one “Why it’s time to do away with the brand manager“. 

The article previews a research report to be distributed by Forrester titled:

Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age

Specifically, this article hightlights the need for marketers to change their organizational structures.  The article identified that the role of “brand manager” should be reclassified as “brand advocate”.   The primary changes to the role would include:

• becoming more customer centric
• move from a generalist role to more of a “pure marketer”
• ability to rapidly adapt global brand platforms
• ensure local marketing conforms to brand equity and strategy
• ditch annual budgeting for earmarked funds for several initiatives
• shift alliances to media and other content creators (vs. long term partnerships with agencies).
• move from anchoring plans around 1-2 big hits to doing many smaller things quickly in real-time

Additionally, the research will show that market research and analytics teams should take a much more prominent role while focusing on predictive modeling.  These teams should become major team players for the brands versus hidden and largerly playing a support role.

Interestingly enough, two major advertisers are citing changes to their organizations that support the research and they include advertising powerhouses, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever.

So what does this mean?   First, understand that our industry is going through a lot of change and trying to figure out how to create an organizational architecture that supports the new role of marketing.  Given the changes that we are seeing, I’ve noticed a few skills that will be important to master in order climb the future marketing organization.  They include:

• Improve your quantitative skills
• Master ”content” creation online including online media and blogging  (and the process behind it)
• Find ways to improve your ability to think on your feet and adapt.
• Lead strategy – focus on the heart  and soul of brand

This research report should have the industry talking as Marketers have been demanding that agenices adjust and be able to adapt to this online world but we’ve seen little “major” organizational changes in our own companies over the years.  Be on the lookout for a lot of changes to org charts  over the coming months and next couple years as the major marketing organizations realign to ensure brand advocates take center stage. 

If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear  from you on this.  I’ll be on the lookout for the report over the next couple weeks.