IRG and Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative announced what they call the world’s first CXO study on how to create, capture, and lead multistakeholder impact.
The study’s definition is unusually specific. Multistakeholder impact means achieving top-line business growth and driving one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at the same time.
Key findings
- The study aimed to identify winning multistakeholder growth strategies and leadership habits, how impact is best measured and communicated, and the role of brands and marketing.
- Its five questions ask which initiatives made the most and least impact and why, what the practical considerations and pitfalls are, how to measure and communicate results, what leadership attitudes and habits are needed, and what role brands and marketing play.
- Four methods run in parallel: vision interviews across the C-suite, a meta-analysis of published initiatives, a longitudinal quantitative analysis of published results, and an artificial intelligence analysis using a tool developed at Oxford.
- The two institutions divide by capability. IRG leads the qualitative interviews using its partner network and alumni community. Oxford leads quantitative research and the machine analysis using its own research-based tools.
- Orientation interviews were already complete with chief executives from Unilever, Heineken, Burberry, WPP and Best Buy, chief marketing officers from Google, Mercado Libre and GSK, and opinion formers including the heads of the B Team and the UN Global Compact.
The swing the study is trying to catch
The background runs from IRG’s own 2018 finding that winning organizations create value for colleagues, customers, communities and the capital markets, through the US Business Roundtable reaching the same conclusion a year later, to the pandemic pushing companies to put colleague and community wellbeing above shareholder needs.
The reversal is what gives the study its urgency. Inflation and recession are described as testing the resolve of leaders who signed the 2019 declaration, with chief executives and any investment lacking an immediate return under intense scrutiny again.
The stated purpose is therefore preservation. The concern is that important lessons about driving shared value risk being lost, and the study sets out to capture, codify and share the best practices before that happens.
How it was designed
The methodology is described as building on three earlier IRG studies and Oxford’s academic research experience, combining scientific rigor with a practical focus so that the results are both credible and actionable.
The interview list reaches beyond the usual pair of chief executive and chief marketing officer to include heads of investor relations, chief communications officers, and chief financial officers, which reflects the study’s interest in how impact is measured and told.
The machine analysis is used to augment rather than replace the rest, identifying key themes, topics, and emerging future trends to enhance the other analyses. An advisory board was to keep the recommendations strategic and actionable.
The interview sample was intended to be globally and industry balanced across business to business and consumer companies, drawing on chief executives, chief marketing officers, and key opinion formers.
Timing and the institutions
The schedule ran interviews and research from January to May 2023, preliminary results in June, and full publication in October. Deliverables were to include fact-based insights and frameworks alongside practical tools and case studies.
IRG describes itself as not-for-profit and independent with named corporate and academic supporters, and grounds its curriculum in the Growth Study, which involved over seven hundred and fifty interviews, five thousand survey responses from seventy-three countries, and behavioral analysis of three million LinkedIn members.
Its earlier record is given as two Harvard Business Review cover stories, Marketing 2020 in 2014 and Insights 2020 in 2017, plus a book in 2010. Oxford’s initiative describes its own purpose as infusing marketing practice with evidence-based solutions, on the conviction that no academic or practitioner should approach these problems alone.
Scope and limitations
This is the plan for the study, dated before it began. The partner list is explicitly potential rather than confirmed, and the document contains no findings.
Source
This page summarises Achieving Multistakeholder Impact (AMI), by Institute for Real Growth (IRG), University of Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative (FOMI), 2022-11-16.