High Performance Marketers

Peter Fisk from PA Consulting Group explores what is required for high performance marketing in today's markets, and how it is only achieved when people and process development is anchored in the critical issues and priority actions of the business.

Marketers have always been proud to champion the customer, to focus on understanding and satisfying their needs. However markets are no longer as stable and predictable as they were. Customer expectations and trends can change quickly, new competitors can rapidly gain a foothold, and new technologies can disrupt the basis of competition. Markets are more global, subject to broader and remote forces, and their boundaries blur as adjacent sectors converge.

The challenge for marketers today is not simply to champion the customer, but to understand and proactively exploit these changing markets, and to ensure that the business is best positioned to create value today and in the future. Marketing therefore has a responsibility to drive the strategic agenda and actions for the whole business. Today's marketer is much more than the researcher, developer, and communicator - he also needs to be the strategist, innovator and facilitator.

Today's high performance marketers must:

It is no surprise therefore that most marketing development programmes which focus only on the capabilities for steady state marketing delivery have limited success. No longer can marketers learn a textbook range of concepts and techniques and hope that they have the ingredients of professional success. The diversity of today's marketing challenges makes the development requirements less predictable, instead requiring a more agile mind, and the resources on tap when they actually are needed.

Developing marketers for high performance
High performance marketers are developed in the workplace, through issue-driven, action-driving interventions that provide the stimulus and support to do a fantastic job in an area or project in which they have little previous experience. This of course needs some structure in large organisations, but the point is to provide a more personal and relevant, provocative and enabling intervention that is anchored firmly in the business need. Within this, it is critical to develop a more open and innovative marketing mind, become an excellent problem-solver and connector of ideas, who can work across sectors and disciplines.

The content focus will cover all the conventional aspects of market research, products and communication, distribution and pricing. It will also address the areas in which marketers can add most value today, such as:

However, high performance development will go far beyond education, probably requiring changes to marketing processes or systems, to develop new solutions and programmes to deliver them. Innovation is achieved by making new things happen in new ways, with expert guidance. Efficiency is achieved by focusing on what really matters, and getting the best return on investment. As well as delivering results, this approach can also directly transfer skills, and produce an evolving best practice within the organisation as the new approaches are documented and applied consistently across the business.

PA's recent experience in this area with companies ranging from American Express and Prudential, to BT and SAP suggests four dimensions to get right.

Focus marketers on what matters most commercially
The starting point in developing a 'high performance marketing' programme is to understand the business priorities which marketing can most effectively address, and the impact this would have. This might be achieved through marketing value-driver analysis, plus impact assessment of potential actions, short and longer-term. This should form the basis of a business case that will engage all relevant stakeholders, demonstrating the return on the investment. For example, a leading media company were able to demonstrate that the programme to develop marketing processes and people would deliver a 30-35% improvement in market capitalisation which made the £1million+ cost much more attractive. This type of pitch will also start to change the perceptions of business leaders towards marketing in general, perhaps recognising for the first time its scale of impact on shareholder value, as well as gaining support for the programme.

Stretch creative minds and build disciplined skills
There will be a broad range of capabilities in the organisation, based on education and experience, specialist and generalist. The challenge is to offer an issue-driven curriculum that is stretching and relevant to all backgrounds. PA's experience, with BT for example, is that there are essentially two levels of education required: one which focuses on the marketing conventions, equivalent to standard textbooks and professional diplomas, the other which 'searches for the edge' exploring the emerging ideas and best practice which will give more advanced marketers, and their brands, a competitive edge. The topics will be diverse. PA typically recommend that workshops are used to integrate ideas and engage group thinking around collective issues, that individual coaching or e-learning is used for more specialist knowledge, and that specific tools and techniques are introduced through tailored clinics, as online resources, or in collaboration with a specialist agency.

Embed and evolve the better ways of working
Capabilities without process and systems to apply them are useless and frustrating. How many marketers know all about one-to-one marketing, online communities, or brand activation but struggle to apply them within conventional ways of working in their businesses? New process, policies and behaviours may well be needed in order to unlock and sustain new capabilities. They will equally be needed to adopt a successful one-off experience as standard practice. At American Express for example, a drive to become more innovative was initially hampered by the lack of any formal definition, processes, responsibilities or strategy for innovation. Processes should be designed and communicated, mapping onto them what decisions and resources are required when. Diageo for one have had success in developing interactive workflows to capture each marketing process, enabling every brand and country to adopt the same approach quickly and efficiently, and to make enhancements to it over time.

Deliver practical marketing results fast
An issue-driven approach to marketing development has the great advantage that it focuses on problem solving, solution development, and accelerated action in priority areas that deliver results fast. At Prudential, for example, PA developed joint 'accelerated marketing performance teams', or hit squads, which sought out the best opportunities for quick wins and then addressed them with their combined knowledge and resources. The Prudential marketers learned practical and relevant new skills quickly, the business got quick resolution to performance issues, and the programme overall was able to demonstrate early signs of success. More strategic opportunities - from new products or joint ventures, to innovative campaigns or pricing models - can also be accelerated through rapid development techniques such as parallel processing, ongoing customer dialogue, or early prototyping. As markets continue to converge and change, marketers will see more and more of the best opportunities outside their traditional capability space, but will still need to act fast and effectively if they are to take advantage.

High performance marketing is no longer measured by academic qualifications but by the number of market opportunities seized and successfully exploited.

PA's checklist for developing high performance marketers:

For more information on how to develop high performance marketing and marketers, contact Peter Fisk on (+44) 0207 333 5422 or email peter.fisk@paconsulting.com
Peter Fisk © PA Consulting Group 2002