What will the “modern” marketing org look like?

The Raffi Report: January 2023

As the co-founder of Passionfruit, every day I spend most of my time speaking to leaders across the world of marketing; from Fortune 500 CMOs, to marketing leads at seed-stage start-ups.

At the end of each month, I distill what I’ve heard into The Raffi Report.

I want this newsletter to become the most definitive account of the Marketing landscape, served up in real time, as the action is unfolding.

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What will the “modern” marketing org look like?

In January, I spoke to 55 marketing leaders. The headlines? We are in the midst of the “Great Reset”. “Marketing teams are shaking things up!”- you might say that this hardly feels like news. But beneath the noise of “people are cutting budgets”, more nuanced changes are taking place. 

Here is what is going down. 

1. Headcount is no longer the answer, and so the question will change.

Everyone wants to share their company’s progress in the public domain, but few want to share exact revenue numbers. In the low-interest era of the 2010s, headcount became the default proxy for that progress. 

If “how big is the team now?” is the throwaway question that keeps getting asked, the natural incentive is to keep growing the team. More people, more progress…?
Leaders have been turning a blind eye to the fact that Instagram sold for $1bn with fewer than 20 full-time employees, or that Berkshire Hathway’s HQ team is less than 30 people strong. 

The right-sizing that is taking place across every business, in every department, is a lagging indicator of change. Upstream, CMOs are clear that throwing FTEs at problems is no longer the answer. 

With capability reevaluations taking place, expect a material rise in the use of flexible, plug-and-play freelance specialists, AI to build social creative at scale and deeper ML operations tooling to segment and serve different audiences in bespoke ways.

2. Jugaad > everything:

Every CMO is optimising for Jugaad. WTF does that mean? Taken from Hindi and Tamil, per Eric Weinstein, the MD at Thiel Capital, it boils down to a question: 

"When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?"

After years of reliable and cheap growth through paid social and search ads, new challenges and opportunities (more on these below) are presenting themselves in real time. 

Previously “deal-breaker” needs, like working in-person in a specific office, are relegated beneath this attitude.

The question on everyone’s lips: how do you test for Jugaad?  There are tools that screen for “beyond-the-CV” aptitude, but increasingly the shorthand for marketing leaders - rightly or wrongly - is becoming youth.

Not for reasons of ageism, but because there is a sense that Gen Z get BeReal, Chat GPT-3, TikTok etc. Expect this to accelerate the recent “Faster. Flatter. Leaner.” phenomenon which has been eroding middle management. 

3. New organic and paid channels are here to stay: social, gaming, streaming

A recession doesn’t eliminate the need to grow. 

The good news for marketers is that there are new unsaturated channels ready to deliver that growth. 

The surprising news is that so few marketers are engaging with these channels yet.

There’s Roblox, there’s Netflix, but the biggest elephant in most rooms is still TikTok. The standard misconception here is that it is “an app for kids”, but the really dangerous one is the belief that it is for entertainment purposes only.

In reality, TikTok is fast becoming the primary SEO channel for Gen Z - and Gen Z is fast becoming the most important segment in many markets; even Luxury is seeing Gen Z represent 72% of the total spend.  

The clever folks at TikTok know what’s up; their recent “Search it with TikTok” speaks directly to this.

As of Q4 2022, only 225,000 businesses had a TikTok account. Expect the majority of marketing orgs to go from passive to active, and start meaningfully investing in both organic and paid TikTok.