IRG and Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative set out to identify and codify multistakeholder growth initiatives that work, how their results are best measured and communicated, and the role of brands and marketing in driving growth for colleagues, customers, communities, and the capital markets.
The purpose is preservation as much as discovery. The document argues that inflation and recession are testing the resolve of leaders who backed the 2019 Business Roundtable declaration, and that hard-won lessons risk being discarded along with the approach.
Key findings
- The study builds on a 2018 IRG finding that winning organizations drive value creation for all four stakeholder groups, a focus IRG named Humanized Growth.
- The scope is five questions: how multistakeholder growth is best defined, which shared value initiatives make the most impact, which metrics capture impact and how to communicate them, how to balance competing stakeholder and time horizon interests, and what brands and marketing must change.
- The interview mix deliberately weights toward the rest of the C-suite rather than marketing, with sixty percent of vision interviews with chief executives, operating officers and finance chiefs, and forty percent with chief marketing officers.
- The two institutions split the work by method. IRG leads the qualitative interview phase using its network and alumni community, and Oxford leads the quantitative research and analysis.
- The distinction drawn from the earlier work is between what and how. The 2018 study identified what overperforming organizations do differently. This one captures how winning organizations deliver, measure, and communicate that growth.
The pendulum the study is reacting to
The background traces a sequence. IRG’s 2018 finding was echoed a year later by the US Business Roundtable, which committed to delivering value to every stakeholder. The pandemic then accelerated the move away from shareholder primacy by forcing companies to put colleague and community wellbeing first, at least temporarily.
The reversal is described in blunt terms. Chief executives perceived by financial markets as not entirely focused on the bottom line are again under intense scrutiny, as is any investment without an immediate financial return.
How it was to be run
The approach has three strands: vision interviews across the C-suite, a meta-analysis of published multistakeholder growth strategies and results, and a quantitative analysis of published business impact results from shared value initiatives.
The study is positioned as building on IRG’s earlier learning studies, naming the Growth study of 2018, Insights 2020 in 2016, and Marketing 2020 in 2014.
An advisory board was to keep the work anchored in real problems, ensuring the study addressed the most critical opportunities and challenges faced by multistakeholder growth leaders and that the recommendations were practical and actionable.
The interview target was a globally balanced, cross-industry mix of business to business and consumer leaders, chief marketing officers, and key opinion formers.
Who had already been interviewed
The completed chief executive interviews included leaders from Unilever, Heineken, Burberry, WPP, and Best Buy.
On the marketing side, interviews were completed with the chief marketing officers of Google, Mercado Libre, and GSK. The opinion formers interviewed included leaders from the B Team, Imagine, and the UN Global Compact.
What it was meant to produce
The deliverables are practical rather than descriptive: best practices and case studies, frameworks and tools, success measures, and peer group convening such as Humanized Growth leadership events.
The document also promises tales from the trenches alongside the insights and case studies, which signals an interest in what practitioners actually experienced rather than only what worked.
The schedule runs interviews and research from January to April, analysis from May to July, and publication in October 2023.
Scope and limitations
This is a study plan rather than a result. The partner list is explicitly described as potential rather than confirmed, and the timing given in the summary differs from the detailed schedule later in the same document.
Source
This page summarises Humanized Growth Impact (HGI), by Institute for Real Growth (IRG), University of Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative (FOMI), 2023.