The Institute for Real Growth and Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative at the Said Business School announced a joint C-suite study on what it takes to win in the shift from shareholder to stakeholder growth. It sets out to identify winning strategies, how impact is best measured and communicated, the leadership attitudes and habits required, and the role of brands and marketing.
The timing is the argument. The study ran from January to May 2023, shared preliminary findings in June and published recommendations by October, because inflation and recession were putting pressure on exactly the commitments made in 2019.
Key findings
- The 2018 IRG Growth Study had already found that winning organizations focus on value creation for colleagues, customers, community and the capital markets.
- The US Business Roundtable reached the same conclusion a year later, committing to deliver value to every stakeholder.
- COVID accelerated the pivot away from shareholder primacy by forcing businesses to put colleague and community wellbeing ahead of shareholder needs.
- By early 2023 the pendulum was swinging back hard, with chief executives seen as not entirely focused on the bottom line under intense scrutiny from the financial markets.
- The stated risk the study exists to counter is that the lessons get discarded along with the concept.
The six questions
The study set out to address how organizations define multistakeholder growth, which initiatives made the most and least impact and why, how to balance differing interests including the pitfalls to avoid, how to measure and communicate impact to all stakeholders, the leadership attitudes and habits required, and the role of brands and marketing in driving it.
Method and division of labor
The approach builds on four previous global IRG studies, Oxford FOMI’s academic research experience, and the practical experience of IRG participants, combining scientific and practical work to reach recommendations that are both credible and actionable.
Three components make it up: vision interviews with CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, heads of investor relations, CMOs and ESG experts conducted by IRG100 participants and community members, a meta-analysis of published initiatives and results, and AI analysis using Oxford FOMI’s Hypertrend tool to identify themes, topics and emerging trends.
The two institutions split the work. IRG leads the qualitative interview phase through its partner and participant community. FOMI leads the meta and AI analysis through its academic network and proprietary machine learning tools. An advisory board is there to keep the questions critical and the recommendations actionable.
The advisory board was drawn to represent every stakeholder group, including chief executives, academics, chief marketing officers, a chief human resources officer, a chief financial officer and leaders from non-profit and multilateral organizations. Confirmed study partners include Spencer Stuart, the B-Team, WARC, the Yale Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management, CKGSB, the ANA, the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Morning Consult.
The interview sample is described as a globally and industry-balanced mix of B2B and B2C chief executives, chief marketing officers and key opinion formers, with pilot interviews already completed with leaders from Unilever, Heineken, WPP, Best Buy and the UN Global Compact among others.
Who is behind it
IRG describes itself as not-for-profit and independent, dedicated to helping organizations shift from shareholder to stakeholder growth, which it calls humanized growth. It is supported by WPP, Meta, Google, Optimizely, Morning Consult, the NYU School of Professional Studies, the Said Business School, CKGSB, the Exetor Group and Spencer Stuart.
The curriculum behind the program rests on the IRG Growth Study, which included interviews with over 1,000 senior business leaders, 6,000 online survey contributions from 73 countries, and behavioral analysis of publicly available LinkedIn data from three million members. Two earlier studies, Marketing2020 in 2014 and Insights2020 in 2017, became Harvard Business Review cover stories.
Oxford FOMI is described as bringing business academics together with senior executives from large companies to address complex problems in marketing, advertising, communications, media and technology, on the stated belief that no academic or practitioner should go it alone.
Scope and limitations
This document announces the study rather than reporting it. It states the questions, the method and the timetable, with full results due in October 2023.
Source
This page summarises Achieving Multistakeholder Impact (AMI), by Institute for Real Growth (IRG), Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative (FOMI), 2023.