The first question to consider is what is your definition of product marketing? IDC's official definition is as follows:
- Marketing professionals accountable for developing and executing the strategy to increase market share for specific products. Activities include market sizing and opportunity assessment, proposing future product development, developing market requirements documents (MRDs), crafting key product messages, conducting competitive analyses, and determining pricing, packaging and program offerings. (this category does not include product management, industry marketing or solution marketing) - refer to IDC's Sales and Marketing Taxonomy
Regardless of your reporting structure, your first step needs to be the definition of this role within the organization including how this role will interact with other parts of the company. (i.e., roles, responsibilities, performance measurement strategy) Many companies have overlapping responsibilities between product management and product marketing depending upon the business unit or individuals' skill-sets. Combining these two roles is also quite common.
So back to the reporting structure dilemma. Not only have I seen product marketing report into different parts of an organization, but I've seen it oscillate within the same company between marketing and the business units every couple of years. Regardless of what has happened historically in your company, product marketing should report into the part of the organization where the greatest misalignment exists today as well as where the greatest opportunities for improvement exist. (assuming these areas of misalignment cannot be fixed more easily from a process or tactics perspective)
For example, Citrix, a company recently cited in the Leadership Quadrant of IDC's 2009 Marketing Performance Matrix, shifted product marketing's reporting structure from the CMO (Wes Wasson) to the business units in early 2009. Wes described it as follows: "we occasionally shift the hard line reporting of field and product groups, depending upon where we most need to optimize". Another factor to consider is who owns the budget. Wes and his team decided to keep the budget within his control. The result is a strong sense of balance between control of staff and related processes (by the business units) and control of the budget (by the CMO/marketing).
What is your product marketing reporting structure and who owns your product marketing budget? Please share your thoughts below or feel free to contact me directly at mgerard@idc.com.
