Capstera.com offers a marketing capabilities list for strategic, operational, technological, and architectural considerations. The marketing capabilities list or the marketing capabilities map is a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive set of marketing capabilities grouped into logical clusters. 

The marketing business capabilities list, or any other business capability map, is essentially an abstraction of the underlying functions decomposed into a granular list spanning multiple levels. 

Marketing Capabilities List:

The following is a small example of a marketing capabilities list. 

• Marketing Management
  • Marketing Strategy and Planning
    • <Capability>
    • <Capability>
    • Marketing Strategy Definition
      • <Capability>
      • <Capability>
      • Marketing Strategy Prioritization

Of course, we have shown a tiny sliver of the capabilities.  

Why do we need a marketing business capability map?

• A marketing capabilities list helps in defining the marketing function in stable elements.
• Capabilities align business and technology teams around a standard nomenclature.
• Associating appropriate technologies to clusters of capabilities helps in analyzing the footprint of applications.
• Roadmaps anchored to capabilities provide a structured approach to future state planning. 
• A marketing capability model is a critical deliverable for an enterprise marketing transformation. 

How do we build a marketing capabilities list?

While building a capabilities model is outside the scope of this blog post, you can find other insights on Capstera addressing the matter. One critical thing to remember is that the marketing capability occupies one slot in a broader value chain map or a typical enterprise capability map. At this level, it is a strategic artifact acknowledging high-level blocks. For implementation and technology enablement, we need to lower detail, context, and color levels. Suffice it to say, in summary, here are a few steps you will need to take to craft a marketing business capabilities model:

• Start with an expansive look at the marketing function – from vision to implementation to feedback loop. 
• Capture the critical lifecycle events representing a marketing value chain.
• Categorize big blocks of activities/functions into a similar level of granularity.
• Decompose the big blocks of marketing functionality into further lower levels of detail
• Go to level 3 or 4 (or beyond) to capture the foundational build blocks of marketing (like Lego blocks)

Of course, you could consider buying a marketing capabilities map instead of building a list from scratch. 

And if you need a capability modeling solution that allows you to create capability maps and quickly manage and elegantly harness them for business/IT optimization, look no further than Capstera.