A new product launches next quarter. Marketing has built the campaign. PR starts briefing journalists but with a slightly different angle. Internal comms has already drafted briefings for managers, based on what they knew two weeks ago. Everyone is doing good work. But each team is compartmentalised, and none of them are talking to each other.
There's an old Taoist saying. A potter shapes the clay, but what makes the pot useful is the hollow inside. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Marketing, PR, internal comms and digital are the clay: separate, however well made. What's usually missing is what joins them.
Marketing communications is fragmented: four or five functions, sitting under different leaders, measured on different things, competing for the same budget, and no campaign was ever going to survive that, however good it was. What joins them is strong leadership keeping them talking to each other and saying the same thing.
Procter & Gamble worked this out earlier than most. Marc Pritchard took the global marketing brief in 2008, and a year later folded market research and design into it too. In 2017, he absorbed brand PR, customer services, social media and media relations as well, merging corporate communications into marketing outright. That was also the year Marketing Week named him Marketer of the Year. He wasn't adding more clay. He was shaping what was already there into one pot. By then, one person spoke for every P&G brand, and one team built it. The structure came first. The work followed.
The same principle holds higher up the org chart too. McKinsey's 2023 analysis of Fortune 500 executive committees found that companies with a single customer- or growth-focused role, whether that's a CMO, a chief revenue officer or a chief growth officer, grow up to 2.3 times faster than those splitting the job across several. Having one marketing function isn't a nice-to-have. It's a growth multiplier.
Most companies know this and skip it anyway. Integration gets run as a workshop, not a structure. The teams stay separate, the budgets stay separate, the reporting lines stay separate. Integration becomes a meeting nobody's excited about, kept on the calendar to prove the company still cares.
The honest reason is that a change like this needs the whole leadership team's attention, not just the CMO's. Each department might know its job perfectly well, which is exactly why nobody thinks to look past it.
Some people never notice the structure at all. When a launch goes wrong, they blame the campaign, or one team, instead of looking at how the whole office works.