Walk into ten different marketing departments and ask where CRM sits on the org chart, and you’ll get ten different answers. Under “digital.” Folded into “loyalty.” Treated as a channel next to email and SMS, reporting into whoever owns the newsletter calendar. Occasionally given its own seat at the table next to brand and communications. That positioning isn’t a technicality: it decides how much budget CRM gets, how closely it’s connected to the tools and data it depends on, and how seriously the rest of the organization takes it.
I’ve seen this play out differently at every company I’ve worked with, and the differences were never really about company size. They were about what marketing leadership believed CRM was.
Where CRM usually ends up
At Chanel, working at the European level, CRM sat squarely inside marketing execution: a channel discipline with real rigor (segmentation, A/B testing, a genuine craft to it), but still reporting up through the marketing plan rather than shaping it. At PUIG (Byredo), rolling out a global Clienteling ecosystem, the positioning shifted: CRM became the connective layer between marketing and retail, which meant it had to answer to both, and that dual accountability actually gave it more leverage, not less. At ICICLE, where I owned CRM end to end (strategy, database, budget, and the retail ambassadors), it wasn’t positioned as a function at all. It was closer to a second P&L: judged on the revenue it generated, not on how well it executed someone else’s plan.
Why the positioning matters more than the org chart suggests
The org chart box CRM sits in matters less than what it sits next to. CRM depends on the same infrastructure digital marketing already owns: the CDP or customer data platform, the marketing automation tool, and the channels, email, SMS, the app, through which most one-to-one communication actually happens. Put CRM anywhere else in the org, and you either duplicate that stack or spend half your time negotiating access to someone else’s.
That’s really why CRM ends up under digital marketing so often. In most cases, it’s not a demotion. It’s proximity to the tools and the data CRM needs to do its job.
Here’s roughly what that looks like once you draw out the rest of the department around it: brand, communications and PR, IMC, product marketing, and, one level down inside digital, social media, CMI, trade marketing, and CRM itself.
Where CRM typically sits within the marketing organization
One way a large organization might lay out its marketing department. The functions, names, and reporting lines vary company to company; this is meant as an illustration, not a template.
Why I think that’s the right place for it
I don’t think CRM needs a separate seat at the table, distinct from digital marketing. I’ve worked both inside that structure, at Chanel and at PUIG (Byredo), and outside it, running CRM as its own P&L at ICICLE, and I’d still choose the first. Sharing one data and channel stack instead of building a parallel one is worth more than the symbolic value of a separate box on the org chart.
What actually needs protecting isn’t CRM’s position. It’s its voice. Wherever it sits, someone needs to be accountable for making sure client data shapes the campaign plan, not just reports on it afterward. That’s a question of how the team works day to day, not where it’s drawn on the chart.
A question for you: does CRM sit inside digital marketing where you work, or somewhere else? I’d like to hear whether that structure has served the function well, or created friction of its own.