Peter Barrett, Director of Marketing, Business & Application Services Fujitsu, reads The Growth Drivers and urges you to read and put into practice its lessons.
How do you transform marketing capabilities in order to drive profitable growth for the business? That’s the exam question Bird and McEwan set themselves. As experienced international practitioners – they set up the Unilever Marketing Academy together – the authors provide a good mix of concepts, case studies and quotes from senior marketing executives in well-known international businesses. This is NOT about setting up a training programme from the ‘bottom up’, rather it examines how you make your business more customer-centric and get marketing to act as a catalyst for broader organisational change from the ‘top down’. It focuses on which areas are critical (the Growth Propeller) and how you utilise the core drivers – people, structure, skills, process and culture – to make this happen (the Brand Learning Wheel).
All the usual rules apply: get board/CEO sponsorship, link this work to delivering key business goals, integrate with the rest of the business, embed into ‘the way you do things around here’ and measure progress. But be warned. This is not insignificant and will take time and considerable effort to effectively change the ‘hard wiring’ of your organisation. (Presumably this was one of the reasons the book was written, as the authors now run a consultancy that helps organisations undertake this type of transformation.)
Overall, I found it easy to read, practical and a good source of insight from those practitioners who have pioneered this approach – and have the scars to prove it!
Join The Marketing Society Book Club. If you are a member of The Marketing Society you could write a 300-word review for the Marketing Society’s blog. Contact Will Armstrong to get involved. Find out more about the benefits of joining The Marketing Society’s exclusive network.