April 1, 2026
A new marketing order
Why the teams adapting best are rebuilding around demand, clearer proof and marketing that works as one joined-up system
Maxine Ashbrook, Marketing Director at Fujitsu UK got to the point faster than most marketing commentary does.
She did not try to outwork the chaos. She changed how the work runs. That line stayed with me because it gets to the heart of what a lot of teams are living through now. The issue is rarely effort on its own. It is the way the work is stitched together, and all the gaps where time, clarity and confidence disappear.
That is why I think a new marketing order is taking shape.
Marketing now has to hold together across more channels, more scrutiny, more internal pressure and more buyer influence than most old operating models were built for. Buyers do not move neatly. Content does not stay in the lane you first published it in. Social, search, events, sales follow-up, partner activity and the website all bump into each other. If the system behind the work is muddled, the market sees the muddle too.
The old shape has run out of road
Max’s example matters because it is so grounded.
She described Fujitsu’s UK marketing team going from 90 people to 13 while the business kept growing. The old model, built around sector and account teams with specialist support, had become unsustainable. Work was being duplicated, similar campaigns were being built in parallel, and the team simply could not cover the breadth of the business in the same way any more. So she reorganised around two core areas, demand generation and customer interlock, pulling together ABM, deal-based marketing, thought leadership, partners, analysts and events into one more connected way of working.
That is a bigger lesson than one company’s restructure.
Time back is not a perk. It is how better marketing gets made
Forrester found only 12% of marketing leaders believe their current organisational design will help them meet revenue targets over the next year, and only 7% think they have the right skills and competencies. That does not sound like a motivation problem to me. It sounds like the shape of the work has changed, and the model has not kept up.
The biggest waste is in the joins
One of the smartest parts of Max’s live was the way she talked about time.
She said marketers spend the day going from one Teams call to the next, with very little uninterrupted time for deep work. She also described multiple versions of very similar campaigns being built in silos, instead of starting with one core campaign and tailoring it from there. That is such a familiar problem. A lot of what feels like workload is actually duplication, handoffs, chasing approvals, rebuilding the same argument for different teams, and reporting that takes ages but does not make the next decision any easier.
You can see the same problem in the wider market.
The State of B2B Marketing report says only 45% of marketers feel very confident connecting data across products, teams and platforms. It also says 49% want better coordination between marketing and sales, 45% want more actionable buying signals or real-time intent, and 57% want a better way to manage budgets across campaigns. So the appetite is there. The friction is in the joins.
Stop planning by format
This is where I think a lot of marketers still make life harder than it needs to be.
If the planning conversation starts with “we need a webinar, some posts, an email and a deck”, you usually end up with a pile of bits and bobs rather than one coherent argument that can travel through the journey. Max talked about building a full content spine instead. Problem framing. Industry view. Thought leadership. Solution options. Capability. Proof. Each asset doing a clear job, and each one able to stand on its own while still pushing the same story forward.
That is a much better fit for how buying works now.
Forrester says 30% of younger B2B buyers already involve 10 or more people outside their organisation in purchase decisions, and expects that level of outside influence to rise past 50%. Social media is already among their top preferred interaction types. So if your thinking is still built around one audience, one touchpoint and one neat journey, you are making the work too brittle for the way people actually buy.
Social is the quickest signal, not the whole plan
This is the bit I care about most.
Max called social “an accelerator”, and I think that is exactly the right way to frame it. Social is not the whole machine. It is not the strategy in isolation. It is the quickest place to test whether the message is clear, whether your proof points have any pull, whether the wider buying group is seeing the story, and whether sales has something useful to follow up on. That only works when social is connected to web, email, events and outreach. Left on its own, it becomes a content treadmill. Wired into the system, it becomes one of the fastest learning loops you have. And commercially useful, it earns its place.
Social earns its keep when it helps the next conversation happen
The measurement story needs to grow up
This was probably the most useful section of the live.
If the work cannot move pipeline, it gets very hard to defend
Max said they moved to “fewer metrics, yes, but sharper metrics”. That is a line worth pinching. She talked about focusing on qualified opportunities, pipeline influence, win rate uplift, content being reused in bids, accounts changing behaviour, and new stakeholders engaging. In other words, signals that help explain movement, not just activity. She was also very clear that reporting had to be reframed in business language, around deals, extensions and upsells, rather than marketing jargon.
The external numbers back that up too.
Sixty-five percent of B2B teams now run a mix of lead and account-based strategy, yet less than 4 in 10 always track qualified accounts or individual leads. That means a lot of teams already know buying is mixed and multichannel, but their scorecards are still lagging behind the job. If you cannot connect lead-level signals with account movement, you end up measuring fragments and hoping people will join the dots for you. They usually do not.
Content has to travel now
This is one of the most useful tests you can apply to any campaign.
Can the same story support an event, a post, a follow-up email, a sales conversation, a partner conversation, a buyer doing their own research, and someone else inside the account trying to make sense of the decision? If it cannot, the work is too flimsy. It might perform for a moment in one place, but it will not help the organisation build confidence over time.
That is why I liked Max’s point about content being reused in bids so much. It is a lovely signal because it tells you the work is doing more than filling a channel. It is helping the business carry proof forward. It is becoming useful in the places where decisions actually get made.
You have to protect the work that matters
There was a line in the live that made me laugh because every marketer knows it.
“Pens, parties and PowerPoints.”
It is funny because it is true. There is always a layer of low-value requests, well-meant interruptions and bits of admin dressed up as marketing support. Max’s point was that a stronger model makes it easier to move more of that into self-serve, say no with a straight face, and keep the team focused on what is genuinely helping the business. She put it even more plainly a few minutes later: “we’re here to impact commercials”. Quite right too. It’s the same point I made when discussing how one of our clients generated a £38M pipeline from social.
The practical bit underneath that is less glamorous, but probably more important.
Max said the thing she would protect, even under pressure, was clarity on objectives before the work starts. I love that because it sounds simple, almost too simple, but it is usually the difference between useful speed and expensive faff. A woolly start does not make you agile. It just means the confusion turns up later, when it costs more.
What marketers should take from this
The interesting thing here is not one team’s org chart.
The fastest route to time back is usually a better operating model
It is that the shape of good marketing is changing.
The teams adapting best are building one campaign spine across the journey. They are joining up social, events, thought leadership, sales follow-up and proof instead of letting every channel wander off on its own. They are choosing sharper signals. They are protecting time for the work that moves demand, confidence and deal progress. They are treating operating rhythm as part of performance, not background admin.
That is what I mean by a new marketing order.
Less random production. More connected systems. Less planning by format. More content that can travel. Fewer comfort metrics. Better signals. Social right in the middle of it, because that is where a lot of the learning happens fastest.
If the job feels harder now, I do not think that is because marketers suddenly forgot how to market. It is because the old model no longer fits what the work has to do. The opportunity is not to squeeze more from the same shape. It is to build a better one.
Source URLs:
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/its-time-for-a-revenue-process-transformation/
Key questions in the webinar
What is the new marketing order?
It is a more joined-up way of running marketing, where demand, thought leadership, sales follow-up, events and social all work from one spine instead of behaving like separate jobs. The point is not neatness for its own sake. It is making marketing easier to scale, easier to prove, and more useful to buyers and budget holders. Max’s example is a good one because it shows how a smaller team can cover more ground when the structure reflects how buying actually works.
Why are marketing teams changing their operating model?
Because old structures are creaking. Forrester found only 12% of marketing leaders believe their current organisational design will help them meet revenue targets over the next year, and only 7% think they have the right skills and competencies. At the same time, B2B teams are trying to run more connected motions across lead generation, account work, data and sales alignment. The pressure is not imaginary. The model really is under strain.
Why does social matter in a joined-up marketing system?
Because social gives you one of the quickest signals that the story is landing. Max described it as an accelerator: the fastest place to test messages and creatives, validate proof points, simplify language and surface engagement signals that sales can act on. But she was clear that it only works when it is integrated with web, email, events and follow-up. On its own, it becomes a treadmill.
What should marketers measure instead of drowning in dashboards?
Max’s answer was fewer metrics, but sharper metrics. She talked about qualified opportunities, pipeline influence, win-rate support, content being reused in bids, account behaviour change and new stakeholders engaging. The wider B2B data tells a similar story: most teams now run hybrid motions, but fewer than 40% consistently track qualified accounts or individual leads. The problem is not lack of data. It is a lack of joined-up measures that explain movement.