The Analytical Marketer

How to Transform Your Marketing Organization

Adele Sweetwood

Harvard Business Review Press, October 2016

Analytics are driving big changes, not only in what marketing departments do but in how they are organized, staffed, led, and run. Leaders are grappling with issues that range from building an analytically driven marketing organization and determining the kinds of structure and talent that are needed to leading interactions with IT, finance, and sales and creating a unified view of the customer.The Analytical Marketer provides critical insight into the changing marketing organization—digital, agile, and analytical—and the tools for reinventing it.

Written by the head of global marketing for SAS, The Analytical Marketer is based on the author’s firsthand experience of transforming a marketing organization from “art” to “art and science.” Challenged and inspired by their company’s own analytics products, the SAS marketing team was forced to rethink itself in order to take advantage of the new capabilities that those tools offer the modern marketer. Key marketers and managers at SAS tell their stories alongside the author’s candid lessons learned as she led the marketing organization’s transformation. With additional examples from other leading companies, this book is a practical guide and set of best practices for creating a new marketing culture that thrives on and adds value through data and analytics.

Available at the following retailers

Book Author Img

About the Author

Adele Sweetwood is Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Shared Services at SAS. There, she guides marketing strategy and go-to-market programs. Her responsibilities span field and digital marketing, demand generation and marketing sciences, as well as retention and event marketing. She also oversees digital investments in advertising, content, search and social media.

Building on almost 30 years of marketing leadership, Adele deeply understands that customers today expect more from businesses. And they want to interact and communicate on their own terms. Her experiences in establishing SAS’ first multichannel customer contact center, its customer reference team, and its award-winning Executive Briefing Center have enhanced the company’s customer centric focus. “Staying connected to each customer in whatever way works best for that individual is the right thing to do. Marketing is a vital avenue in forming that connection,” she says.

The emphasis on building an analytical culture in marketing and delivering relevant programs to clients drives Adele’s management strategies. She empowers her organization of more than 400 marketers with data and analytics that support revenue growth and optimized customer interactions. Most recently, she led the transformation of SAS’ marketing organization to meet the opportunities of a globalized market.

Adele has been published in numerous magazines and is a prolific spokesperson for the company, regularly speaking at internal and external events.

A passionate and authentic leader, Adele’s life and work experiences allow her to inspire an environment that not only solves problems and implements change, but also fosters collaboration, decisiveness and communication. Away from the office, she volunteers as a leadership mentor and has served on the boards of several community organizations such as Raleigh Jaycees and the NC Make-A-Wish Foundation. She graduated from East Carolina University with a marketing degree and is actively involved with many marketing focused communities and organizations.

Back to Projects