BUILDING MARKETING CAPABILITIES TO FUEL GROWTH
BUILDING MARKETING CAPABILITIES TO FUEL GROWTH Of all strategic levers to drive competitive advantage, building marketing capability was identified in Marketing2020 as the most important. Across all industries, over-performing organizations train their marketing teams more often and better than the competition, and are growing their revenues faster. What does it take to win? Powerful converging forces including the rise of digital, globalization, and increasing consumer expectations are transforming the marketing mix as well as how marketers manage their brands and consumer relationships. Winning brand leaders balance agility and an understanding of new technologies, touch points and partners, with indepth, consumer insights-led strategic planning, and long term brand consistency. The importance, and pay-back, of building a learning marketing organization has never been greater. Indeed, one of the key insights of the Marketing2020 study is that organizations that focus on offering their teams marketing capability development programs, ranging from foundational skills such as positioning and brand strategy, to advanced big data analytics, total experiences and integrated connections planning, are creating an invaluable advantage over their competition. Marketing2020 is the most comprehensive marketing leadership study ever conducted with in-depth contributions from over 350 CEOs, CMOs and marketing thought leaders, and online responses from over ten thousand marketers in 93 markets. Marketing2020 is led by MB Vermeer in collaboration with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Spencer Stuart and Forbes. The study results formed the basis for the best-selling HBR cover-story, The Ultimate Marketing Machine, published in June 2014. Here we review these findings and focus on what it takes to develop and embed winning programs. CONVINCING DATA FOR CHANGE The Marketing2020 data builds a strong business case for making marketing training more important. Organizations that over-perform in revenue growth train their marketing teams more than their competitors and receive higher scores across all training program topics. The need for training is broadly recognized: Very few of my team members are sufficiently-well versed with changing marketing requirements, said one Consumer Products Goods CMO we interviewed. It quickly became clear that we needed to reprioritize our marketing investments and focus more on developing marketing capability development programs. All areas of marketing are impacted by the challenge of the changing future. The Marketing2020 results show that capability levels measured among over-performers are higher across the total range of marketing topics measured.
From the fundamentals, including consumer understanding and brand strategy, to big data mining and analytics, capability scores are significantly higher for companies that were outgrowing their competitors. This positive correlation between marketing capability and revenue growth was also found to be true for brand health levels and marketing return on investment levels. MARKETING CAPABILITY PROGRAM BENEFITS Building marketing capabilities has always been recognized by leaders as important, but all too often training programs are deprioritized because of lack of urgency. The advent of marketing in a digital age seems to be changing this. Most of the winning organizations studied in Marketing2020 are re-prioritizing their training programs and freeing up the resources and time required for effective training. A dedicated capability-building program helps marketing leaders drive clarity around objectives, offer new tools and share best practices, leading to improved quality and greater consistency in the delivery of a brands total consumer experience. The benefits beyond revenue growth are substantial: New and increased skills. Most often the primary role of marketing capability-building programs is to offer team members a safe environment to understand and experience new marketing tools, technologies and processes that need to be integrated into the marketing mix. Strategic clarity and consistency. Winning programs are designed around a specific brand or corporate strategy and contribute significantly to greater program and brand experience consistency. Brand differentiation. Building marketing capabilities around a specific strategy also helps differentiate the brand. Training programs clarify and embed brand purpose, vision and strategy. They help hard-wire the brand DNA into everything the company does with impact well beyond the marketing and media mix. Community. An effective capability-building program creates a common language and esprit de corps that enables teams located all around the world to work together seamlessly and share best practices, processes, tools, and templates with ease. Speed and agility. Piloting programs and iterative improvement of what works and what does not are the hallmarks of winning Marketing2020 organizations. A common language and culture that celebrates internal transparency around program effectiveness is crucial for success. Innovation and adoption. Effective capability development programs foster a more open mindset to taking risks and learning from colleagues elsewhere. This increased receptiveness to new ideas and approaches, in turn accelerates innovation. Attraction and Retention. Companies that provide professional development are more successful in attracting and retaining top talent. Keith Weed, CMO of Unilever, said, Marketing is now perceived as a more important and active department. This creates a halo effect that motivates both our internal and external talent. NOT ALL MARKETING CAPABILITIES ARE EQUAL There is no one-size-fits-all marketing skills playbook. Different capabilities play different roles in developing and delivering winning marketing strategies and the Marketing2020 results showed a wide variance of prioritization of capabilities among the companies that participated. What is clear though is that the foundational capabilities such as consumer understanding, brand positioning and brand strategy are deemed to be of the highest priority. The CEO and CMO interviews led to the conclusion that this is probably a reflection of the new marketing in a digital age requirements: As the impact of digital has been moving upstream from media buying to marketing mix development, to category disruption and business strategy reinvention, organizations are finding that challenging prevailing assumptions and mastering the basics is now more important than ever before. Further analysis leads to some quite surprising learning about winning capability program design.
From big data to big insights. With the explosion of big data, or Infobesity, overperforming companies differentiate themselves by prioritizing training programs focused on integrating and applying the many customer data points available to marketers to develop more holistic and personal brand activities. Real-time program design. A new topic appearing on the curriculum of some of the most advanced marketing organizations is real-time marketing. Focused on leveraging small data or even tiny data such as clickstream, GPS movement, and even Apple Watch data, to adapt brand marketing programs on the fly. Brand positioning and strategy. Counterintuitive perhaps, but the Marketing2020 data shows the biggest impact on company revenue growth from training programs that challenge the most basic premises of business. Questions like why does the brand exist, what should be the product offering, and how do we go to market, are very much on the table. Brand positioning and strategy over-index as important and urgent among over-performers. Purpose. In an age of increased transparency and functional benefit parity, customers are more often choosing brands because of what they stand for, not just what they deliver. Over-performing brand leaders are creating clarity, internally and externally, about their purpose and inspiring their colleagues to unleash that purpose through every relevant touch point. Total experience marketing. Winning marketers are going from a focus on touchpoint consistency to a more seamless, relevant, inspiring and personalized consumer experience that delivers value across all touchpoints. Customer engagement journeys. Marketing2020 over-achievers prioritize the ability to understand and then effectively interact with multiple channels and touch points. Digital and social media transcend the brand purchase funnel and are creating the opportunity for higher-level category consumer journeys. Evolving from a traditional Integrated Marketing Communication process to a personalized connections planning requires major process and skill adaptation. For example, Coca-Cola considers the content of its communication to be liquid and linked. TEN TIPS FOR GREAT MARKETING CAPABILITY STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT A hallmark of winning marketing capability programs is that they approach skill and expertise building in a way that is tailored to their culture and business needs. Instead of sending their marketers on ad-hoc external training programs, these organizations develop a capability strategy and curriculum that reflects their own market vision, strategy and philosophy. In addition to the made-to-measure approach of winning capability programs, the Marketing2020 findings highlighted more strategic and practical characteristics of winning programs. Some of the recommendations that flow from studying over-performers include: 1. Start with the business DNA and purpose. Explicitly Capture and leverage your company s culture, DNA and vision or purpose the characteristics and original capabilities that make your marketing organization and brand distinctive and identify specific pockets of excellence in the company. 2. Differentiate capabilities and prioritize. Be clear about which capabilities are foundational and required for everyone, and which are considered transformational, necessary to win in the immediate future, and more urgent for some specific teams. 3. Connect to the business strategy. Define how the capability development curriculum will help drive the business objectives and, specifically, how your way of marketing will address skill gaps.
8. Build a multi-year strategy. Embedding marketing capabilities takes time. The ability of any organization to successfully adopt new ways of working should be reflected in the strategy and timing of program development and roll-out. Program offering should recognize the natural planning and business cycle. 4. Treat programs as an investment. Collaborate with Finance and HR to set measurable business and development targets that reflect the result of the capability development program impact and offset these benefits with the cost of the program. Our research finds that the pay-back on capability programs is very significant. Build in progress indicators for the short term as well. 5. Define your own, holistic, way of marketing. Make the effort to build your very own intuitive and comprehensive marketing framework that expresses a clear point of view on how marketing drives business and brand growth for your organization. Root the philosophy in past successes and identity of the company and connect the way of marketing to the purpose of the vision. Include a visual identity! 6. Build supporting infrastructure. Ensure that the development and activation of your way of marketing program is owned by a dedicated team and that the resources required to succeed are available. Although great programs are always very closely connected to the day-to-day business, lack of dedicated resourcing is one of the biggest pitfalls to avoid. This is not something that your brand teams can do on the side of their day job. 7. Take an interdisciplinary approach. The most effective marketing capability programs are fully integrated into company processes. Collaborating closely with IT to ensure systems integration, HR for linkages with promotions and job requirements, and Finance so the ROI on training is treated just as thoroughly as the investment in a new factory plan. These all contribute to building a seamless learning culture that transcends silos. 9. Ensure relevance through governance. Build in senior business leaders visibility, ownership and support by creating a program governance process that requires regular sign-off on curriculum changes, the selection of internal experts, and case studies to be featured as best practice. Monitor progress and training effectiveness with bi-annual progress reports, and always review specific training evaluation reports.
10. Teach in the moment. Although in-person classroom style training remains highly impactful, few organizations these days can afford to bring teams together physically. Winning capability programs include always-on digital learning bytes available for any time consumption, for example, during the morning commute. Whether searching for tips on how to deliver a creative agency brief, or learning how to think about packaging in anticipation of a supplier meeting, training modules should be easily accessible. KANTAR VERMEER MARKETING CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT For over 15 years Kantar Vermeer has been supporting leaders unleash growth with the development and embedding of winning marketing capability programs. Our global experience runs across both B2C and B2B and includes work with clients that include Unilever, Diageo, Google, Starbucks, Fonterra, Shiseido, Verizon, Goodyear, and Virgin. Please let us know if you would like to discuss how marketing capability programs can help unleash your growth. ABOUT KANTAR VERMEER Kantar Vermeer is the only global marketing consultancy focused on unleashing purpose-led growth through the development and embedding of consumer insight-led marketing strategy, structure and capability. We work with leading brands and marketing organizations across all geographies, B2B and B2C, and across all industries. Our global network includes offices in New York, London, Beijing, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Sydney, Dubai, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Tokyo and Cape Town. For more information, or to speak to one of our senior partners please see our website or contact us: info@kantarvermeer.com.
OUR SOLUTIONS Kantar Vermeer works with Heads of Marketing, Brand and Market Research to develop and embed purpose-led growth marketing solutions. We provide solutions to strategic marketing challenges, rooting our approach in consumer research, stakeholder understanding and financial analysis. We tie insights to dollars, the only universally accepted language of business. Our whole-brain thinking brings an intrinsically multilens and practical approach to all our work. Purpose Strategy Organization Excellence Business Impact