The Marketing Department ’23

Organisation | Roles & Responsibilities | Priorities

About the study

Marketing, communication and branding have become more important and are now business-critical for most companies and organisations.

Marketing communications is essential to creating a competitive advantage in a world of connected consumers and global competition with generic products and services. And with e-commerce, physical distribution and the competitive advantages it provides are also disappearing.

Over the past 15 years, marketing communication has changed an enormous amount. We have added more channels, systems, data, specialists, and e-commerce activity. Combined with changed consumer behaviours, this has created complexity that can be difficult to grasp.

With AI and continued technology development, there are no signs that it will decrease. But at the same time, the business impact of marketing communication has decreased over the same period*.

Since new technologies and channels have made it possible for everyone to communicate, marketing communication is created in many different places inside a company. This makes the role of the marketing department unclear, and there are even those who have claimed that the marketing department’s time is over. It is undoubtedly a challenging role to be a marketing manager today.

The purpose of this study is to find out what the role and situation of the marketing department is today in larger Swedish companies and to identify challenges and possible measures for the future.

The goal is for this report to serve as a basis for helping companies sharpen their marketing department for the future.