Marketing organizations rarely become complex all at once. Complexity accumulates as new channels are introduced, technology expands, teams become more specialized, customer journeys evolve, and more people become involved in decisions and execution.
Each change may make sense on its own. Over time, however, the organization can become fundamentally different from the one its operating model was designed to support. Marketing has evolved, but the way work moves through the organization may not have evolved with it.
This tension is increasingly visible. Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found that martech utilization had fallen to 49%, while CMOs oversee an average of nine marketing channels. The issue isn't simply the amount of technology or the number of channels. It's the growing operating environment around them.
Complexity often appears first in the work
Leadership may not describe the problem as an operating-model issue. Instead, they see campaigns taking longer to launch, teams duplicating work, unclear ownership, inconsistent handoffs, manual workarounds, growing approval layers, or technology that isn't producing the expected value.
These are meaningful operating problems, but they don't tell leadership why they're happening. The visible problem is a starting point for investigation, not the diagnosis itself.
Consider a campaign that consistently takes too long to launch. The immediate response might be to add capacity, introduce workflow software, automate more of the process, or push the team to move faster. Any of those responses could be appropriate.
But the delay could also come from incomplete intake requirements, unclear ownership, unnecessary approvals, poor handoffs, inconsistent processes, or repeated rework. In that case, trying to make the existing workflow move faster doesn't necessarily address what is creating the delay.
Growth changes what the organization requires
An operating approach can work well at one level of complexity and become difficult to sustain at another. Informal coordination may work with a small team. Decision rights can remain implicit when the same leaders participate in most important decisions. Process variation may be manageable when dependencies are limited.
As the organization grows, those conditions change. More specialized teams create more handoffs. More technology creates additional integration and governance requirements. More customer journeys require coordination across functions. More stakeholders increase the need for clear ownership and decision authority.
Research from McKinsey reinforces this tension. In a 2024 survey of 104 C-suite growth and marketing executives at consumer and retail companies in Europe and North America, only 27% reported having mature marketing operating models with the capabilities, talent, and partnerships needed to support advanced marketing use cases.
What once worked through proximity, institutional knowledge, or individual effort may eventually require a more deliberate operating structure.
Adding more isn't always the answer
When marketing becomes harder to operate, organizations often respond by adding something: technology, people, processes, automation, agencies, or organizational changes. Sometimes those investments are exactly what the organization needs.
But adding capability to an operating environment that isn't understood can also introduce more complexity. More capacity cannot resolve every ownership problem. A new workflow cannot resolve every decision problem. Automation cannot resolve every coordination problem.
Understanding what needs to change requires examining how the work actually operates: where ownership sits, how decisions are made, where approvals and handoffs slow things down, how teams coordinate, and whether technology and processes support the way the business needs to operate.
The intervention should follow the evidence.
Some parts of the organization may be working well and should be preserved. Others may need targeted improvement. Some may no longer support the level of complexity the organization has reached and require more fundamental redesign.
The objective isn't change for the sake of change. It's understanding what the organization needs now.
Has the way marketing operates kept pace?
Marketing will continue to evolve as technologies, customer expectations, capabilities, channels, and business priorities change. That doesn't mean every change requires a new operating model.
The more useful question for leadership is whether the way marketing currently operates still supports what the business is asking marketing to do.
When that answer becomes unclear, the visible problems are worth investigating. Sometimes a campaign delay is simply a campaign delay. Sometimes it's an indication that the organization has evolved faster than the way it operates.
Sources
Gartner — Maximize ROI With Marketing Technology (Martech)
McKinsey & Company — Connecting for growth: A makeover for your marketing operating model