2nd of August 2018

Published by Marketing Week See original article

How GSK’s digital transformation enabled it to ditch ‘safe’ advertising

GSK has introduced a marketing capability programme as it looks to transform marketing at the business by defining a new model for brand building and rethinking “safe” advertising in the healthcare sector.

The programme, called Marketing IQ (or MIQ for short), aims to “reboot” the marketing skillset at GSK. It aims to upskill marketers on the GSK “philosophy on marketing” as well as marketing in a digital world, with the goal of ensuring its marketing function embeds all aspects of the discipline from insights and analytics to media and content.

The marketing curriculum has an online component but is also being taken across 21 of GSK’s markets and in its category teams. And while digital transformation is a key reason for launching the programme, that doesn’t mean GSK wants to create a separate digital function.

“[This is about] how we reboot the marketing skillset at GSK and how we make sure digital upskilling isn’t about a separate [function] but how we think about marketing in a digital world,” GSK’s chief digital officer Marc Speichert tells Marketing Week. “It’s not about creating a separate digital function on the side… it’s about a marketing services organisation where [all the functions] are embedded.”

The focus for MIQ has been “getting the foundations right”, according to GSK’s top marketer Carlton Lawson. That means marketers are getting training in areas including programmatic, content and search optimisation.

READ MORE: Meet the brands investing in talent retention to create a pipeline of future leaders

Lawson admits that GSK has had “an ambition” around digital marketing since 2010, but that it was finding it very difficult to get beyond that ambition other than having a “draconian we will spend 20% of our media [in digital]”. However, what that led to was marketers spending budgets on banner and display advertising that might have had poor ROI but felt “safe”.

“When you analyse why we were stuck, it’s because we didn’t create a safe environment for people to put their hands up and say, ‘I really don’t understand how to do this, I don’t understand search engine optimisation or search strategy’, they didn’t know where to begin,” he explains.

To address these issues, Lawson hired Speichert as CDO in early 2017 and built a marketing services division under him. Speichert joined from Google and has previously worked at L’Oréal on digital transformation.

“What I really wanted to do, and Marc is able to deliver, is to build the foundations, create a learning organisation, a cultural shift where it’s ok if you don’t know how to do it but what’s not OK is people not stepping out and learning how to do it,” he explains.

When you analyse why we were stuck, it’s because we didn’t create a safe environment for people to put their hands up and say, ‘I really don’t understand how to do this’.

Carlton Lawson, GSK

Speichert says “going back to basics”, particularly in search, has been key. There are more than 150 billion searches a month (one in every 20 searches on Google) around healthcare, making the area “super strategic” but one where GSK didn’t have much rigour.

Over the past 12 months it has looked at language and the type of searches where it wants to compete and own or where the company just wants to participate, and creating a framework and templates that each market can use.

The result of that has been an increase in ROI, although Lawson won’t give details. In the same vein, ROI on programmatic is “increasingly strong”.

“We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in our digital savviness, we are now competing within our peer group of Unilever, etc. We’ve got a long way to go but our ambition is to be the best digital marketers in healthcare,” he adds.

While marketers are being upskilled, execs across the business are also looking to improve their capabilities. GSK has set up a ‘Digital Advisory Board’ that matches its own execs with those from other companies so it can draw on their expertise. These experts include people such as Dana Anderson, chief transformation officer at consultancy MediaLink and former Mondelēz CMO.

READ MORE: Dana Anderson on life after Mondelēz and why ‘rule-bound’ FMCG is changing

The aim is for the whole company to be thinking about the transformation, not just marketing, with the board members tasked with challenging GSK execs on their long-term strategy and the transformation of their own function.

“It is very much about transforming the whole enterprise. Marketing is the core engine, but if the functions around it are not enabling how we are going to do marketing in a digital world then that becomes a barrier,” explains Speichert.

“Most companies are not thinking about it holistically, at least in the consumer packaged goods space. Even some of the past companies I have worked for have made great progress on the marketing side, but are old school in some of the other spaces, which in the end stops you from a scale perspective from becoming disruptive, rather than being disrupted yourself.”

GSK’s marketing philosophy

Another area of focus has been embedding GSK’s marketing philosophy across the business. The company has been through a period of change having taken full ownership of the joint venture with Novartis and hired a number of people from outside the business (usually from other FMCG companies) to help with its transformation. What that means is that while business performance was improving, GSK didn’t have a “GSK way of doing marketing”.

To address that, Lawson changed GSK’s marketing philosophy from ‘Building category defining brands consumers love’ to ‘Building brands trusted for life’. That shift came about because when GSK looked at why a consumer chooses one of its brands rather than private label, it is not “because of love”, which Lawson says is hard to define and measure”, but trust.

Lawson then took the principles of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute as a model for growth. GSK currently reaches about one billion consumers annually, but sees a big opportunity to reach the other 6.6 billion if it can “reach people with the right product at the right price at the right time”.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

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