As the marketplace evolves ever more rapidly, marketers struggle to keep pace. Their traditional stratagems—redesigning market segmentations, building strong brands, and hiring cadres of marketing managers—continue to be necessary. But unless those solutions can be mobilized rapidly, many marketers could find themselves overtaken by their competitors, for a fundamentally different way of organizing companies to exploit opportunity seems to be emerging among many growth leaders. You might call them venture-marketing organizations (VMOs), since like venture capitalists they are quick to spot new possibilities, to allocate resources to the best ones, and to cut their losses as they go.

Such groups realize that to outpace the market consistently, they must not only create fluid organizational structures but also provide for unyielding rigor in measurement and decision making. As a result, they enjoy revenue growth rates that on average are one and a half times those of the competition (Exhibit 1). Incumbent or attacker alike, they are capturing more than their share of market opportunities.

Stay fluid

When traditional marketers think of organization, they mean structure: distinct product, channel, and customer groups focusing on specific functional tasks, such as brand management, customer segment management, and market research. Functional managers play the...