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Consumers are rapidly shifting their media consumption to emerging channels. As this transformation continues, the challenge for corporate marketing will be to ensure their department structure adapts to this seismic media reorientation.

In the previous era of one-way, corporate-controlled communications, marketing was most often structured in vertical stacks around product groups, usage groups or channel groups. Those channels could include sales, brand advertising, promotion, PR, direct marketing, event marketing, etc. The Web as a channel has changed the equation, because the Web can function well as a super channel for brand, sales promotion, direct sales, events, etc.

Today, even when traditional channels are used, the Web is often a major complementary component. The sales function uses the Web for leads and sales support. Direct marketing uses the Web for fulfillment. The brand-building function of marketing now often sees the Web as the most vital first brand touchpoint.

Emerging digital channels have shifted control of marketing to the consumer, and it is no longer possible to manage the “boundaries” of communication that fit so conveniently into the vertical corporate marketing stacks of yesterday. Consumer perceptions and preferences are now fed by wide and deep brand experience interactions that are more in the customers’ hands than with marketers.

I don’t know the precise structure of corporate communications that will best align with these new marketing realities, but I can offer these few thoughts:

• Corporate marketing must become more interdisciplinary than its intradisciplinary legacy encourages. Emerging media has allowed the consumer to be exposed to and affected by brand conversations from people they trust the most: people just like them. If marketing has become more conversational among important audiences, then marketing departments must also become more conversational.

Those conversations should begin with interdisciplinary discussions within the marketing function. Sales and marketing need to talk. Marketing and IT need to talk. Sales promotion and brand managers need to talk. And everyone needs to be talking about to how to improve the brand experience for customers and prospects.

• There needs to be increased focus on listening to the voice of the customer. This includes not only what they are saying, but also what they are doing (data). While the Web has given the customer the upper hand with regard to message control, it has given corporate marketing the upper hand with data. The Web provides a rich and real-time environment to see what works, and to then be able to quickly adjust marketing activities accordingly.

What marketers have lost in top-down control with marketing, they can now partially recoup with bottom-up marketing fed by data that turns into knowledge, which, in turn, can quickly be converted into insight for the next marketing cycle. Online measurement systems, on-demand CRM platforms, feedback loops, and other data inputs can provide much more dependable, useful and immediately actionable information than was possible in the previous mass-media, spend-and-hope era of marketing.

• Corporate communications needs to become more aware of its digital footprint and plan accordingly. In was only a few years back that digital marketing got about as much attention as Milton in the movie Office Space. Things have moved swiftly since then, and digital marketing has figuratively moved from an office in the boiler room to a corner office in the executive suite. Digital has literally become the game-changer for companies looking to reinvent the marketing equation.

Many corporate marketing departments are still operating in the traditional planning cycle and the then-by-the-way-where-does-digital-fit-in mode. Digital is the bedrock of many future company marketing efforts, and the sooner marketing begins planning their strategy built on this foundation, the sooner they ensure their futures. The first step in this process is a thorough and strategic look at their entire digital footprint and make plans to increase the size, depth and effectiveness of this impression.

Change is upon us, and, as usual, that presents corporate communications with both substantial roadblocks, but also a virtual autobahn of opportunity. If marketing departments can more quickly and effectively adjust to the nature of this change, they will be doing much to be make sure they are operating from the opportunity side of the change equation.