Marketing has come a long way, but it is not yet customer-obsessed. To address this gap, we’re pleased to announce the launch of Forrester’s new marketing innovation playbook. It’s time for companies to undergo a marketing makeover. This playbook guides brands through assessing four pillars: mindset, talent, process, and insights.

“Marketing innovation” and “process,” you ask? In the same sentence? They seem at odds with each other. But marketers understand the value of process. Most marketing teams have a shared drive full of templates for common projects with repeatable tasks and patterns — such as initiating a campaign, exhibiting at a trade show, or launching a new product line. Our playbook addresses three maturity levels to get brands from process 101 to process mastery:

  • Beginner level: Consider five new perspectives on marketing process, because marketing requires a process reboot. To design processes that can enable and accelerate the pivot to customer obsession, think about process in five dimensions: structures, systems, patterns, evaluations, and outputs. Check out Lori Wizdo‘s blog post and our full report.
  • Intermediate level: Adopt an Agile methodology to embed customer obsession in marketing. Taking a cue from software developers, Agile principles address the kinds of situations marketers face today: constantly changing requirements, cross-functional demands, and high-performance expectations. For more, read Ryan Skinner‘s full report.
  • Advanced level: Stop improving your marketing processes; instead, start disrupting. The steady pace of continuous improvement has its limits, and automation will eliminate process as we know it today. Eventually, marketers will be free from their daily minutiae because they’ll need only to create inputs and monitor machines over time to accomplish those same tasks. Discover how in our full report.