This document describes two linked things. Horizon3 is a capability program connecting fifteen senior partners to clients, experts and best practices, and challenging them to guide the firm’s own growth strategy. The Initiative for Real Growth is the thought leadership program those participants would lead.
The initiative’s stated subject is how to drive real growth in a disrupted world, building on the Marketing2020 and Insights2020 experience with an added level of data and metrics rigor.
Key findings
- Real growth is defined at the outset as sustained business growth benefiting both the top and bottom line and all the company’s major stakeholders.
- The research design combines qualitative stakeholder interviews conducted by partners globally, field and desk work, a data backed growth framework, and a benchmarking tool.
- The interview target was several hundred stakeholder interviews completed by mid-June, ahead of the first face to face workshop.
- The business case cited was the precedent: Marketing2020 and Insights2020 generated over 250 new business conversations, 100 conference presentations, and over $25 million in consulting and benchmarking fees.
- The document ends by anticipating what actually happened: evolving the Initiative for Real Growth into the Institute for Real Growth as a more permanent vehicle.
The design philosophy
Horizon3 is described as a collaborative experience in which participants learn from and contribute to each other and the wider marketing and retail world. The overall design existed, but the detail was to be determined interactively and iteratively across the year.
The end result was not left open. By December 2018 every participant was to have a fully holistic client-side understanding of where the market is going, and the board was to have received strong recommendations on the firm’s own growth.
Participants would run the whole research chain themselves: expert and client vision interviews, desk research, case study development, quantitative survey design and analysis, benchmarking, recommendations, and the internal and external communication of the findings.
The demand made of them personally is unusual for a capability program. Every participant would be challenged to reconsider what the firm considers best practice, relearn how to learn, and become comfortable with the fact that much about the direction of travel is still unknown.
The year, month by month
April opened with introductions, defining expertise, experience and learning objectives at personal and group level, and reviewing how each person learns and collaborates best. By May the team would expand to include thought leaders from across the group and external partners, and would define the full scope of the initiative around everything the target group of CMOs, CCOs and heads of retail can influence.
June was the first face to face workshop, at the Cannes Lions Festival, with a week structured day by day: two days learning from external best practice across the conference tracks, a Wednesday of client workshops discussing preliminary interview findings, a Thursday workshop for thought leadership colleagues, and a Friday close on next phase planning and roles.
July and August covered supplementary desk research, completing the interviews, and preparing the quantitative survey, which went live in mid-August and ran to the end of September. October brought the second face to face meeting, likely at the ANA Masters of Marketing in Orlando, where preliminary survey results would be discussed with board members and tested with delegates.
November integrated interviews, survey results and desk research into a data validated model called the Framework for Real Growth, supported by case studies and a key findings deck. December was final reporting, production and rehearsal, plus development of the benchmarking tool. January was the global launch, with the benchmarking tool letting clients assess the size of their opportunity and what to prioritize.
Governance and partners
The initiative was to have an external advisory board with academics and growth experts from the client side, finance, LinkedIn and executive search, with the CMOs of Bank of America and HP already committed, alongside an internal steering committee of agency chief executives.
The partner list drew on the earlier studies and reached across trade bodies, academia and the press, including the ANA, AMA, ESOMAR, ARF, the Said Business School, Wharton, the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review.
Scope and limitations
The document states its own status plainly: both programs were in early stages of development, and the details were provided for planning purposes and might change.
Source
This page summarises KC 2018 Horizon3 Leadership Program: The Real Growth Initiative, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Paul McGowan, Frank van den Driest, 2018.