Gartner Research

Centers of Excellence in Marketing: A Guide to Understanding and Implementing COEs

Published: 19 April 2023

Summary

Centers of excellence are designed to effectively build core capabilities that can be consistently delivered at scale. CMOs must understand what a marketing COE is, how and when it can be used to accelerate maturity and capability development, and the steps to take to establish one.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • CMOs are evolving their teams through increased centralization to create more efficient, scalable, flexible and resilient marketing organizations.

  • With an increased focus on streamlined and centralized operations, centers of excellence (COEs) are an increasingly popular structure within marketing organizations. Many marketing organizations that are centralizing functions and capabilities are using a COE.

  • Because being centralized isn’t the same as being a COE, CMOs often confuse COEs with other centralized structures, such as shared service teams. But miring COEs in operational execution can stymie their ability to grow and evolve strategically important capabilities.

Recommendations

To effectively build and benefit from COEs:

  • Clarify

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Analysts:

Ewan McIntyre

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