Marketing-Transformations-Beratungsdienste

Marketing transformation services change three things: what marketing is accountable for, how it is organized to deliver that, and how its performance is judged. We work on those decisions. We do not buy media, build or integrate marketing technology, or staff your team.

• Since 1999brand, demand and marketing strategy
• Über 200veröffentlichte Fallstudien
• 10 Niederlassungenauf vier Kontinenten
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting
• No media, no softwarewe sell neither, so the operating model advice carries no commercial stake

Wenn Unternehmen uns beauftragen

• Marketing is treated as a support function. It is asked for assets and campaigns, it is not in the room when the growth decisions are made, and nobody can say what it is accountable for.
• A reorganization is being drafted. Boxes are being moved before anyone has written down which decisions marketing is supposed to own after the move.
• Capability varies by market. The same function performs well in two countries and badly in six, and the difference is not budget.
• The agency model has drifted. Several agencies, overlapping scopes, no shared definition of good work, and briefs that get rewritten three times before anyone starts.
• Marketing performance cannot be defended. The function reports activity and reach to a board that is asking about contribution.

Why most marketing transformations change the chart and nothing else

A new structure is announced, a platform is bought, roles are renamed, and eighteen months later the same person signs off the same decisions on the same evidence. The transformation was real. The mandate was not touched.

That happens because structure and tooling are the only parts of marketing that are easy to specify. Mandate is harder: it means writing down which growth decisions marketing owns outright, which it informs, and which it has no say in. Most transformation programs skip it, so the organizational design has nothing to be designed around and defaults to tidiness.

The second failure is quieter. Under pressure to prove contribution faster, a transformation reallocates from brand building to what can be attributed this quarter. That looks disciplined and it is expensive. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, Unrealized Value by Joachimsthaler, Powney and Rolka, found that strong global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year from 2001 to 2024. A dollar invested in those brands became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. A transformation that improves measurement by shrinking what is worth measuring has not made marketing more accountable, only smaller.

What our marketing transformation services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements start with the first two and stop where the value runs out.

1. A marketing capability assessment

Before any structure is drawn, we establish what the function can actually do today, market by market, against what the growth plan requires of it.

• Capability assessed across planning, insight, brand, performance, content and measurement, with the gaps ranked by what they cost rather than by how far they sit from a maturity model
• The variation between markets and categories treated as the finding it usually is, because an average hides the two places where the problem actually lives
• The capabilities that should stay with agencies or partners, named deliberately rather than by default

2. The mandate: what marketing is accountable for

The decision that determines whether any of the rest holds. It is written as a list of decisions, not as a purpose statement.

• The growth decisions marketing owns outright, the ones it informs, and the ones it does not touch, agreed with the people who currently hold them
• What marketing is measured on as a result, and what it is explicitly not measured on
• Where the mandate conflicts with sales, product or the country P&L, surfaced before the structure is drawn rather than discovered after

3. Operating model and organizational design

Structure written after the mandate, so that each box exists to hold a decision somebody named.

• What sits centrally, what sits in market, and the specific decisions each level is allowed to make without escalating
• The planning and briefing process, which is where most marketing operating models lose their time rather than in the org chart
• Governance: who signs off what, on what evidence, and at what point in the calendar

4. The agency and partner model

Most marketing capability questions turn out to be questions about the boundary between the company and its agencies.

• Which capabilities belong inside and which are better bought, decided on how often the decision recurs rather than on cost per hour
• Scopes rewritten so that two agencies are not being paid to disagree about the same brief
• The brief itself, and the standard the company uses to judge what comes back

5. A sequenced roadmap and change support

The roadmap is the deliverable most often written and least often sequenced. We sequence it against what the organization can absorb.

• A phased plan with the dependencies made explicit, so capability is built before it is required rather than after it is missed
• The measurement line from marketing activity to commercial contribution, defined before the structure changes, so the before and after are comparable
• Advisory support through implementation, including the skill gaps that will limit the plan and how the organization closes them

How a marketing transformation engagement works

1. Assess. Interviews across marketing, sales, product and the country leadership, a capability read by market, and a map of how marketing decisions are actually made today rather than how the process document says they are.
2. Settle the mandate. The decisions marketing will own, inform or leave alone, agreed with the executives who hold them now. This is a negotiation, and treating it as a workshop output is why it so often fails.
3. Design. The operating model, the organizational design, the planning and governance process, and the agency model, each written so it serves a decision from the mandate.
4. Sequence and support. A phased roadmap with dependencies, the measurement line to commercial contribution, and advisory support while your teams implement it.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for marketing transformation

• We start at the mandate, not the chart. The decisions marketing will own are settled before a structure is drawn, which is the step that decides whether the new organization behaves differently from the old one.
• We sell no media and no software. Our view on your technology, your agencies and your in-house boundary carries no commercial stake, because we do not stand to supply any of it.
• Demand comes before the function. Our demand landscape work means the mandate is written against where growth actually is, rather than against the categories the current structure already covers.
• We say what we do not do. The boundary below is on this page deliberately, because a transformation partner who claims the whole chain usually ends up selling you the part they staff.

How to evaluate a marketing transformation consultant

Das sollten Sie bei jedem Unternehmen auf Ihrer Auswahlliste erfragen – auch bei uns.

• Ask them to define the mandate before the structure. A proposal that opens with an operating model template and closes with an org chart has skipped the only question that changes behavior.
• Ask what they will not do. A firm that also buys your media, builds your stack or supplies your contractors is answering the capability question with its own order book in view.
• Ask how they handle market variation. A single global model applied to eight countries with different retail structures and agency markets is a presentation, not a plan.
• Ask what the measurement line is. If nobody defines how marketing contribution will be judged before the change, there will be no honest way to tell afterward whether it worked.
• Ask who owns the plan when they leave. Implementation support that depends on the consultant staying is a retainer wearing a roadmap.

Marketing transformation consultancy, marketing agency or systems integrator?

Where our work stops

We are a strategy firm. We assess marketing capability, settle the mandate, design the operating model and the agency model, and advise through implementation. We do not run your marketing: we buy no media, we build and integrate no marketing technology, and we do not recruit or supply people into your team. Where a transformation needs those, we write the specification and the selection criteria and you appoint the firm that delivers them.

Two adjacent decisions have their own pages. If the question is what the marketing plan should say rather than how marketing is organized, start at marketing strategy. If paid spend has stopped scaling and the question is what that spend is for, start at performance marketing, where we also buy no media.

Verwandte Arbeiten

• Marketing strategy for what the plan should say, once the function is organized to deliver it.
• Performance marketing if the immediate problem is paid spend that has stopped scaling.
• Organizational design when the structural question runs wider than marketing.
• Capability development for building the skills the roadmap depends on.
• Change management if adoption rather than design is the constraint.
• Demand landscape mapping to write the mandate against where growth actually is.

This work sits inside our Competitive Strategy practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Marketing transformation services in the US and worldwide

Our marketing transformation work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. The operating model question is market-specific in a way that the mandate is not: retail structures, agency markets and the amount of decision authority a country team expects all differ, and a model that works in the US often fails in markets where the local team holds the P&L. We settle the mandate once and design the operating model by region.