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Accept the challenge

Accept the challenge

The Brand Learning WheelTM is a simple model to help organisations appreciate what building marketing excellence requires in practice and helps them prioritise the core capability drivers

Delivering growth is the key challenge facing organisations across the globe. in their book The Growth Drivers, Andy Bird and Mhairi McEwan argue that there has never been a more challenging – or a more exciting – time to be a marketer

The world is changing fast. The breathtaking pace of technological advances and the advent of social media have prompted an unprecedented growth in ‘people power’. In parallel, the urgency of achieving environmental sustainability, the shift in economic power to emerging markets and the cultural implications of globalisation are transforming the world in which we live.

The speed and scale of these changes are having a major impact on all organisations. Yet, as businesses everywhere strive to keep pace with these challenges, they remain under more pressure than ever to drive profitable, sustainable growth and deliver shareholder value – creating a significant growth challenge. As organisations struggle to weather the storms of economic recession, the focus for many is on the financial drivers of shareholder value, on cost reduction, efficiencies, staff severance and budget restrictions.

But costs can only be cut so far. There is now a growing recognition of the need to embrace new market opportunities, to create value in new ways and to drive growth in a more proactive and sustainable way that addresses the needs of all stakeholders – customers, shareholders, employees and society as a whole.

We believe that the most urgent priority facing all organisations striving to drive growth today is to pay as much attention to the marketing drivers of performance as they have traditionally paid to the financial ones. In The Growth Drivers™ we focus in detail on the critical contribution of three key, interrelated drivers of business growth.

  • Marketing: the discipline and practices of marketing, which enable companies to create better value for their customers and thereby drive sustainable, profitable, demand-led growth.
  • Marketers: the people who are responsible for specialist marketing tasks and activities – however these are defined in any specific organisation.
  • Marketing capabilities: the ability of people, teams and organisations as a whole to manage the marketing activities needed to create better customer value and drive demand-led growth.

Of the three, marketing capabilities deserve particular attention because without focus on developing and sustaining these, the potential impact of the other two on commercial performance is unlikely to be realised.

The challenges facing marketers are considerable. Let’s be under no illusions, it’s a demanding job. As markets mature, competition intensifies, and the pace of technological and social change accelerates, the relentless search for cut-through innovation and better value to maintain competitive edge is increasingly difficult to achieve.

For companies to succeed and flourish, investment in building the marketing capabilities of their people, teams and the organisation as a whole needs to be an important strategic priority. At a time when many organisations are facing unprecedented challenges in driving growth in today’s global networked markets, this call to action has never been more timely or more important to commercial success.

Finding the Way Forward

Investing in ‘training’ is not enough. Organisational leaders who want to drive demand-led growth need to take a more strategic, holistic and integrated approach to the development of marketing capabilities. By investing greater time, effort and resources in building marketing capabilities, they will be better equipped to improve commercial performance and drive growth.

In our experience, marketing capability development needs to be approached in a way that is focused on supporting the marketing capability needs and strategy of operating teams, business units and the whole organisation – not just individuals within it.

The drivers of marketing capability

Early on in our work with multinational companies, we realised the outdated concept of ‘training’, as opposed to capability development, was so deeply entrenched in some quarters that we needed a simple way to challenge that thinking and to explain the power of a more holistic approach. This would move beyond the focus on individual skill development and training to embrace the impact of a range of other important drivers of capability that influence the way marketers work in practice.

We explained this new approach by creating the Brand Learning WheelTM. This simple model helps organisations appreciate what building marketing excellence requires in practice and helps them assess and prioritise each of the core drivers of their own organisational marketing capability.

Defining a marketing capability strategy

Given the acknowledged importance of marketing capabilities as a key growth driver within an organisation, we believe that strong senior leadership and proactive development of a strategy to build marketing capabilities is essential. Yet this is often not the way capability development is managed in reality.

In order to define the best marketing capability development strategy for any particular organisation, it is vital that two golden rules are followed.

  • Golden Rule number one: Marketing leaders must lead marketing capability development. In our view, it is the direct responsibility of the marketing leader and leadership team to drive the strategic marketing capability agenda because it is they who are ultimately accountable for marketing’s contribution in terms of driving growth for the business. If they are to ensure the contribution of the function is in line with the requirements of senior management, they need to manage their expectations appropriately and build the capabilities needed to succeed.

In all the work that we’ve done with our clients over the years, the single biggest factor that has influenced the effectiveness of marketing capability programmes has been the extent to which senior management and marketing leaders have seen these programmes as a strategic means of proactively driving business growth.

  • Golden Rule number two: Marketing capability development must be planned strategically. It is critical to apply the same rigour and discipline to the development of a marketing capability strategy and plan as that which lies at the heart of effective marketing strategy and planning. There are many such ways in which the approach to marketing capability development can draw from marketing disciplines but this is one of the most important.

Strategic planning stages

The key stages of defining a marketing capability strategy are similar to the development of any effective strategy.

  • Step 1: Define the vision for marketing. To lead a programme of effective change, the first step is to begin with a clear and compelling vision of the future which sets ambition and context, inspires people with a sense of possibility and engages them emotionally to commit their energy to making the vision a reality.

So, marketing leaders wanting to drive change in the capabilities of their people, teams or organisation, need to define an inspiring vision for the role of marketing in the business. They need to align other stakeholders in helping to shape that vision and establish the scale and scope of the marketing capability development needed.

  • Step 2: Conduct a marketing capability situation analysis. Once key stakeholders have agreed on the vision for the role that marketing will play in driving organisational performance, the next step is to assess how well the marketing function, and potentially the broader business, is equipped to deliver this vision in practice.
  • Step 3: Define and align objectives. Having defined the main marketing capability issues facing the business, marketing leaders must then establish a clear and ambitious view of the role they want marketing capability development to play and the related objectives and metrics.

At the highest level, we have found it is helpful to start by crafting a simple statement of the overall goal or mission of the programme.

Marketing capability mission statements define clearly and simply what the marketing capability programme is setting out to achieve. They help align other stakeholders and sharpen the focus of subsequent strategy and programme development. However, it is also important to drill down objectives to a more detailed level, defining specific, measurable targets and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to help set direction and track progress over time.

The ultimate measure of success of a marketing capability programme relates to its impact in creating better customer value and driving profitable business growth. However, to be meaningful, objectives and KPIs need to differentiate the unique impact of capability building activities from the other drivers of business performance.

  • Step 4: Develop the marketing capability strategy. Having defined and aligned clear, focused capability development objectives, the next step is to develop the marketing capability strategy. Up to this point, there may be clarity on ‘why’ a marketing capability initiative is needed, but not on what that initiative will comprise.

Underpinning the strategic decisions taken at this point are usually some guiding principles or beliefs that emerged in discussion with senior executives during the earlier stages of the strategy development process.

  • Step 5: Build the implementation plan. The final step in defining a marketing capability development strategy is to agree all the core elements of the capability programme implementation plan. What will it look like in practice? What will be its scope, impact, timing and resources? What will be the key deliverables such as priority processes, best practice or mandatory tools, job role profiles and blended learning programme elements (for example, workshops, virtual classrooms, online portals)?

There will also need to be a time plan, an engagement plan and clarity on the budget scope and responsibility. Another important component is a clear explanation of the internal roles and responsibilities for making things happen.

With significant resources invested in global brand innovation and communication campaigns, organisations are becoming well aware that small improvements in the quality of these activities can make a big difference to the return on investment delivered from marketing.

Martin George, managing director for group development at Bupa, explains: ‘Inside a business it’s a war for resource. The CEO only has so much money and so many people, so either we get them in marketing or the HR director gets them or finance get them. The person who ultimately succeeds in securing resource will be the person who is going to add most value to the bottom line. Profit is the common denominator; that is what you’ve got to learn to focus on.’

In conclusion

There has never been a more challenging time to be a marketer – or, one could argue, a more exciting time. However challenging the developments facing organisations, as in many earlier periods of revolution, they are creating enormous growth opportunities for businesses to seize the moment and actively shape their future.

But marketers must first build the engine to drive the growth. The growth itself will come from effective marketing, but it is the capabilities needed to drive better marketing performance that will provide the energy and momentum for success.

Andy Bird and Mhairi McEwan are the co-founders of Brand Learning and authors of The Growth Drivers™: The Definitive Guide to Building Marketing Capabilities (John Wiley & Sons). Readers can pre-order the book from www.wiley.com and receive a 20% discount with the code VB528. Brand Learning is a global leader in building organisational marketing capabilities.

www.brandlearning.com.

Extract: with the kind permission of Wiley.com. ©Andy Bird & Mhairi McEwan 2011.

 

Astrazeneca

AstraZeneca launched a marketing capability ‘Health Check’ for its new Global Marketing teams using a mountaineering analogy with powerful emotive and visual imagery. People were initially inspired with examples of world-class marketing from other industry sectors and then the teams worked together, led by their senior manager, to rank themselves on a five-point scale across a set of the eight key areas within AstraZeneca’s own marketing capability framework.

“It was good for us because there were new teams coming together and it allowed them to have really good discussions about what they do, how they do it and their ambitions for the future. It helped us identify key capability gaps and themes for our programme to focus on.”

Tim Bailey, head of marketing academy, AstraZeneca

 

Expert opinions

‘We live in an environment that is changing hugely. Competition is continuously more challenging, the fusion of media and technology is transforming the relationships between brands and consumers, and there is a need for brands to possess a social integrity beyond their economic intent. So it is critical, if we are to continue to deliver results and win in our categories, that we build up stronger specialist marketing capabilities across the organisation.’

Mark Baynes, global chief marketing officer, Kellogg

‘Training in a traditional sense wouldn’t apply in our business because it’s a whole change programme we need to go through – changing processes, changing attitudes, changing behaviours, a whole raft of things. It is not something that happens just over one workshop or attendance at one programme, but it happens in people’s day-to-day tasks and that needs to be embedded over a period of time. It takes many months, even years to achieve that, but when you get there it makes a significant impact on the business.’

Navjot singh, global marketing manager – recruitment and hr communications, shell

‘It’s not something to be undertaken lightly. You have to be single minded and determined that you want to bring a level of consistency across the globe and across the brand. I do think it is very helpful, maybe even critical, that you get a number of the functions joined up here because if people had seen The Diageo Way of Brand Building (DWBB) as just a marketing thing, the opportunity to chip away at it would have been huge. But the fact that there are a number of people joined together that are really driving this is very important.’

Nick rose, former chief financial officer, Diageo

 

Marketing Capability Development – Missions

‘To help build great hotels guests love by developing best in class skills and processes in hotel brand management, sales and marketing.’

intercontinental hotels group

‘Giving marketers the confidence to outperform.’

Unilever


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