4th of July 2017
How we work with rival sponsors
I was recently asked on a TV interview if rival sponsors (eg Coke, Pepsi) both adopted the Institute’s discoveries wouldn’t there be no competitive advantage? That is, wouldn’t both ‘be back at the starting line’? My host laughed when I said that was an excellent question, but also quite stupid. I explained that it was a bit like two rival hospitals deciding not to adopt this new ‘medical research stuff’ because if they both did then they’d just be the same.
There’s more to it than that of course. In the same way that Newton’s laws don’t tell Boeing’s aeronautic engineers how to make an aircraft the Institute’s discoveries don’t dictate marketing tactics. They are essential to know in order to avoid strategic error but they leave much room for creative action (now built on a proper understanding of the world).
In other words, implementation matters. Quality implementation, across many people operating in different countries, with different agency partners, depends on building a common understanding of the Institute’s discoveries (sometimes called ‘the laws of growth’), common language, common metrics, and deep understanding of the practical implications of the discoveries. This takes time, and considerable effort to embed in an organisation. Bruce McColl describes the (on going) transformation at Mars Inc as ‘two steps forward and one step backwards’ – over and over. The steps backwards come from staff turnover, change of agency personnel, and just the human tendency to fall back on old habits.
So our sponsors talk of being on a journey. A journey to embed evidence-based marketing practice. To build a culture where decisions are based on the current evidence (eg the Institute’s best practice summaries). A culture of doing experiments, and of being sceptical as well as open-minded (the two key personality traits of science).
Some sponsors are further on the journey than others. Some are moving faster than others.
We offer a variety of ways to move faster on the journey.
We have a large number of scientists, but our capacity is still limited. We don’t play favourites, but we work more with sponsors who engage more. Our aim is to have the capacity so that any sponsor who asks to do more, to move faster, can be helped to do so.
Some sponsors are behind rivals in their progress. The understanding is patchy across the organisation. They rely heavily on management consultants and agency partners to do their analysis and decision making. They lack the consistency and discipline that comes from basing decisions on a solid bedrock of knowledge. Either they have suffered from organisational restructures, senior staff turnover, or leadership aren’t sure of how to make progress.
We are working on ways to give sponsors ways of measuring their progress, of assessing staff knowledge, comprehension, and how this varies across the organisation (and agencies). Our aim is to give senior management information to help them guide organisational transformation.
Building better marketing capability is an on-going task, and probably the most important task a CMO has.
