The session is organized around four learnings about capability building programs, and it names them before it argues for any of them. Prioritize, differentiate, embed and digitalize.
It starts from why companies do not do this rather than from why they should. Capability building is described as important but not urgent, crowded out by day-to-day business distraction, questioned on return on investment, and hard to embed as behavioral change.
Key findings
- The first finding is that there is no shortcut through one capability. The session states that no single capability creates winners, and that over-performers consistently perform better in every capability.
- The training gap is quantified. Over-performers are reported to invest up to 20% more in training time per employee on an annual basis.
- Differentiation means codifying a way of marketing rather than adopting a standard one. The session shows five companies whose approaches differ in who they target, what they stand on and how they express it, from P&G on segmentation and purchasing barriers to Unilever on need states and societal purpose.
- The audience argument is that the traditional format has stopped fitting. Traditional capability programs are described as not working for a millennial audience, which seeks ownership, learns whenever and wherever, and expects real time content and interactivity.
- The proposed mix is heavily weighted away from the classroom. It is set out as 70% learning on the job, 20% coaching and 10% classroom.
What replaces the course
Basic capabilities are broken up and taught at the point they are needed. They are described as sliced and diced into approved elementary ingredients, flexible, modular, and open and distributed.
The classroom survives for the harder capabilities and changes shape. It moves to live action and a community of practice, focused on the transformational capabilities, built cross-functionally, on relevant real-life cases.
Ownership of the content is put with marketing and infrastructure with HR. The session says winners give ownership to marketing, with HR building infrastructure, measuring progress and owning transversal leadership capabilities.
The worked example is Diageo, and its distinguishing feature is enforcement. Every marketing director trains for two weeks a year, and one person is charged with ensuring consistency and staying focused on deployment.
Scope and limitations
This is a client session and it closes as a proposal. The last section sets out the consultancy’s own approach and named assessment tools, and the discussion questions are addressed to one company.
Source
This page summarises How to Equip for Growth in an integrated and personalized marketing era, by Millward Brown Vermeer, September 2014.