Capability is a leadership job, not a training budget. Jim Stengel spent seven years as Global Marketing Officer at Procter & Gamble, overseeing an $8B advertising budget and close to 7,000 people, and gave as much time to building global marketing capability as to the marketing mix itself. The authors read the outcome in the portfolio: 22 brands each above US$1 billion in sales, with eighteen more between US$500 million and US$1 billion.
Scale only pays if a winning concept can be identified in one market and moved quickly to others. That is what the authors mean by arming everyone with the information, skills and tools they need, and then getting out of the way. The obstacle is arithmetic: capability building shows a return over the following year rather than the following quarter, which is exactly what makes it the first line cut under budget pressure.
Key findings
- In the authors’ 2008 Leading Global Brands Asia study, only 28 percent of respondents thought regional teams did a capable job of building skills in-country.
- Fewer than a third of those respondents, 31 percent, said they had access to the company’s best practices at all.
- Unilever’s Brand Marketing Planning process was embedded into 32 hot spot markets and used as the training moment itself, taking a trial year followed by a full roll-out year.
- Spencer Stuart’s Greg Welch names multi-cultural marketing, digital and social media, and sustainability as the breadth a marketer is expected to carry, calling sustainability table stakes rather than competitive advantage.
- P&G interviewed all of its aligned agencies about what it was like to work with P&G’s marketers, treating the agency roster as evidence on internal capability gaps.
The capabilities and skills worth building
Functional expertise is the floor, not the ambition. Market research, consumer insight, distribution, channel, competitive intelligence, pricing, sponsorship and social media are baseline table stakes that simply allow a company to play the game, and even these are sometimes missing. Above that floor sit five things worth deliberate investment: a common marketing language, basic marketing skills and processes, category and market expertise, brand clarity and consistency, and planning tools that let one market reuse a tactic another has already proven.
Common language comes first for a mechanical reason. If two teams describe the same consumer habits, benefits and positioning in different words, they cannot identify a shared best practice, let alone transfer one. Category expertise is handled through immersion programs built at firms as different as Starbucks, Novartis and TomTom, ranging from a Beauty Academy to a Foods Excellerator. Successful CMOs do not hand this to HR or a training manager. Once language and a base set of skills are harmonized, the global team can safely relax its guidelines.
Breadth as teams get smaller
Without new capabilities, step-change transformation is impossible, and an organization that fails to articulate what it will need next will simply shrink under cost pressure. The goal is to do more with less, not less with less. How training is scheduled matters as much as what it covers: most companies train individuals in isolation, when it is more advantageous to train people in their natural teams — an innovation team taken through a program with R&D, the agency and the customer managers, so the learning lands on live projects.
Breadth is genuinely hard to reach. “It’s very difficult to become incredibly well-rounded these days,” Greg Welch of Spencer Stuart tells the authors, and the topics he lists cannot draw on internal experience, which is why they sit apart from the staple curriculum. For those, the authors pair rather than lecture, singling out reverse-mentoring, coupling senior marketing managers with young marketers, as among their most effective formats. The digital partners named in 2010 date the example; the mechanism does not.
In-house capability against agency spend
Marketing excellence and general training have long been the discipline’s ignored, underfunded and too-often-outsourced stepchildren, cut off at the knees at the first sign of budget pressure. Nigel Gilbert of Lloyds Banking Group supplies the arithmetic: there are always twice as many worthy causes and twice as many candidates for an operational budget than it can fund. The protection is ownership rather than eloquence, and leaders ring-fence the budget by making the priority part of someone else’s agenda too.
Sending high potentials to expensive programs at INSEAD, Kellogg or Harvard is the easy route and the ineffective one: the returning delegate faces an overloaded inbox and indifferent colleagues. Institutionalizing capability in-house, through a marketing university or academy linked to career progression, is the alternative. Outside help keeps two roles — subject matter the company has no internal experience of, and capacity that has to move, such as the SWAT teams of ad-hoc expertise that fly into one market one day and another the next.
Scope and limitations
The capability figures come from one regional study, the authors’ 2008 Leading Global Brands Asia research, where the depth of marketing capability tracks market maturity.
Capability measurement is also vulnerable to gaming, since respondents have an incentive to play the system whenever program results are linked to salary or bonus.
Source
This page summarises The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2010.