I’m a very inexperienced gardener. I’m lucky that the annuals in the yard I inherited from a previous green-thumbed owner are fairly hearty and thrive despite my lackluster efforts. But even I know that if I manage to nurture a seed into a seedling, I wouldn’t then start to measure success by how many bunnies are aware of its presence, by the satisfaction of the bees who frequent it, or by its efficient use of resources. I’d measure success by continued growth, and I’d ensure it through an intentional combination of activities and enabling conditions.

Such should be the case for marketers, as well: Growth has always been the goal, and that mandate has not gone away. If anything, it has become more urgent, yet many marketing functions still behave as if growth happens as a byproduct of everything else they do and measure.

Forrester’s data shows the gap, with only 18% of B2C marketing decision-makers saying that they frequently use revenue growth to measure and attribute the incremental business value of marketing. Customer satisfaction and loyalty are among the top responses, but those metrics only tell part of the story.

Growth Is At The Heart Of Our B2C Marketing Capabilities Map And Assessment

Informed by focus groups with CMOs, Forrester established seven priorities of B2C marketing executives that build on and interact with each other to deliver growth, outlined in Market To Grow: A Practical Framework For B2C Marketing Executives.

In our new report, The Forrester B2C Marketing Capabilities Map And Assessment, we identify 30 capabilities that set up B2C marketing functions to drive business growth. These flow from the seven priorities as well as four additional capabilities required to plan for, adapt to, and influence growth: developing growth strategy; innovating winning products; leading change; and influencing stakeholders.

The B2C Marketing Capabilities Map is designed for the marketing function as a whole. Capabilities may reside in different teams, individuals, or ways of working, depending on the organization’s strategy and operating model. What matters is that the capabilities exist somewhere within the function and can be activated to support growth.

Prioritize Investments By Assessing Your B2C Marketing Capabilities

Our capabilities report is paired with an assessment that helps CMOs evaluate gaps and prioritize investments. Rather than relying on intuition, CMOs can identify the capabilities that represent the greatest opportunities to improve their ability to drive business growth. Not every weak capability deserves immediate investment, not every strong capability deserves more resources, and not every shiny new capability is equally important to the business strategy.

The B2C Marketing Capabilities Assessment collects two inputs: (1) how important each capability is to the organization’s success and (2) how effectively the organization currently performs against it. Those inputs help categorize capabilities into critical gaps, core strengths, underleveraged assets, back burners, and throwaways.

Marketing organizations often feel the need to be great at everything because everything feels important to someone, but growth-minded CMOs need the discipline to decide what to fix, what to scale, what to park, and what to stop pretending matters right now.

Marketing leaders are under pressure to do more with less, prove more with better evidence, and adapt faster than their organizations often allow. That’s not going to change anytime soon, so CMOs need a clearer view of what their marketing function is capable of so they can build it around their company’s growth strategy.

Forrester clients can read The Forrester B2C Marketing Capabilities Map And Assessment to begin diagnosing their function’s readiness for sustained growth. To discuss how this applies to your organization and to take the full assessment, request a guidance session. And don’t worry: I’ll keep you posted if I’m capable of growing anything but weeds in my yard.

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