What does marketing effectiveness really look like in a global company with over 300 people in Marketing spread across 11 countries and more than a dozen business units? That’s one question we explored in our Masters of Marketing podcast with Helen Burbank, Director of Marketing Effectiveness and Strategic Projects at Springer Nature.
Helen sits at the intersection of process, people, and performance. Her focus is clear-cut: identify what’s working, what’s not, and how the marketing organization can operate more effectively.
“We’re somehow in the market in pretty much any country that researches,” she noted. That kind of global footprint demands a high level of coordination, something Marketing Resource Management (MRM) tools like Marmind help to enable.
However, it’s not just about tools.
It’s about people, process, and patience.
Marketing Effectiveness as an Ongoing Mindset
Marketing effectiveness, in Helen’s words, is not just another KPI. It’s a continuous, structured way of thinking. She describes her approach as looking at everything - yes, even her walk to the coffee machine - as a process. But the goal isn’t complexity. It’s clarity.
“Particularly in the marketing context,” she explained, “trying to figure out where you can remove steps in order to make things run more smoothly, where we’ve got potential to automate and what it would take in order to do that.”
This approach has helped Springer Nature as they transitioned away from legacy systems to a centralized platform that brought budget visibility, campaign planning, and collaboration into one environment.
A problem-solving mindset is the backbone of effective marketing operations: not focusing on the tool first, but on the outcome. In Helen’s case, the outcomes were greater visibility, transparency, and the ability to scale repeatable practices across the marketing organization.
Change Management Is a Process, Not a Sprint
Helen’s role also involves a large degree of change management, which is widely known as a notoriously tricky area in marketing transformation projects.
“You’re going to repeat yourself an awful lot,” she said, commenting on the realities of managing change in large, global teams. Communication is everything. “People only hear what you’ve told them,” she emphasized, “so that means you are repeating yourself in different constellations an awful lot.” Effective change management isn’t one-size-fits-all. Different stakeholders, whether senior leadership or individual contributors, need different levels of detail.
The key is tailoring your message based on how much change they’re expected to undergo. This mindset becomes especially important during large platform rollouts. When Springer Nature adopted Marmind, they weren’t just introducing a new system, but introducing a new way of working. Helen worked closely with stakeholders across the board to make sure everyone - from budget owners to power users - had the right training, support, and expectations.
Marketing Efficiency Requires Systems (and Discipline)
One of the less glamorous but absolutely critical components of marketing effectiveness? Naming conventions.
“They’re probably the unsexiest topic in the world,” Helen commented with a laugh. “But they’re so fundamental to working across large organizations.” It’s a small but crucial part of enabling comparability, reporting, and visibility. Marketing efficiency at this scale isn’t just about tools and dashboards, it’s about having the operational discipline to make sure everyone’s speaking the same language.
At Springer Nature, the implementation of Marmind centralized that discipline. The system helped consolidate campaign data, budget planning, and resource allocation across multiple teams, allowing for smarter, faster decisions. With global budgets being spent across hundreds of digital channels, maintaining control and visibility is non-negotiable. “You’re talking about money that’s ticking out every minute of every day across the world,” Helen explained. “So keeping that consolidated is really important.”
Is Marketing Effectiveness Worth It?
From global system rollouts to ongoing process improvements, we can see that sustainable marketing performance is built on clear strategy, adaptable systems, and relentless attention to detail.
Marketing effectiveness isn’t about perfection; it’s about progress. And it’s a lot more than just tools. As Helen put it, “Figure out what you need to solve, and how you do that is quite secondary.”
That mindset, more than any platform or process, might just be the most important tool in a modern marketer’s kit.
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