for a New Era of Global Marketing Leadership
These are exciting times. Social marketing.
Big Data. Globalization in new forms. Gender-based programming. Experiential
selling. Real time pricing. Ecommerce of all shapes and sizes. Crowd sourcing.
Cloud offerings. Multi-channel distribution.
Marketing is changing. Profoundly. The
management implications are changing. The corporate role of marketing
leadership is changing. The question is: How prepared are today’s complex global
organizations to keep up with, let alone get out ahead of, the high-speed
evolution we now see in marketing?
Many senior executives recognize the
challenge and are prioritizing inter-regional efforts to raise the strategic
marketing competency of their next-generation leaders . This white paper
describes the coming need they see for Global Marketing Leadership. And in
response it proposes an integrated, cross-border program to structure and
enliven the extended development journey these future leaders will have to make
if they are to be fully effective in the 21st century’s marketing-saturated
world.
Marketing in the 21st Century. New technology
possibilities and new customer demands are changing the marketing conditions
that make a business model successful or not.
As a consequence, an unprecedented transition is rocking the discipline
of marketing. Consider, for instance:
• Cloud computing is
changing the work of hardware resellers from “moving boxes” to selling
subscription services. What’s the best way for a technology innovator to move
into cloud offerings without bankrupting its channel partners?
• Online recommendation
site decide.com reports that over the course of a single day retailers on
Amazon.com changed prices on a Samsung 43-inch plasma television four times,
between $398 and $424. Around midday, Best Buy boosted the price to $500 from
$400 before dropping it back down, while Newegg in the morning raised its price
to $600 from $500. What’s the right
approach to price management for companies navigating such a chaotic
marketplace?
• Procter &
Gamble is moving the headquarters for its beauty business from Cincinnati to
Singapore. What’s the best way for a company to organize and manage far-flung
resources for advantage as global markets reallocate and new centers of
customer power take hold?
• Amazon.com has launched
a new B2B industrial supply venture in an effort to cash in on the fragmented
and comparatively competition-light industrial supply market served by thousands
of small-to-midsize distribution businesses across the U.S. and hit the ground
running with over 500,000 products. What are the channel implications for
traditional B2B product makers and their traditional distributors?
• Haute couture “runway”
events in Paris and Milan are now being live-streamed from apparel-makers’ web
sites to remote invitees. What are the pros and cons of new digital marketing
avenues for global luxury brands?
A hundred cases like these could be cited on
all sorts of dimensions to illustrate that companies are under immense pressure
to make big shifts in global marketing strategy and execution. Some are doing
it by choice. Others, by urgent necessity.
Either way, a more fundamental trend is
clear: Marketing leadership is in ascendency. From a tactical functional role
it is taking the lead on the corporate
growth agenda. The growing diversity, complexity and importance of global
marketing challenges mean that functional responses have to be led, and with at
least as much single-mindedness as product design, development, and
manufacturing have always commanded.
Overcoming Shortfalls in Marketing
Leadership. While strategically placed new executive hires can certainly make a
difference, no company of any global stature can rely on pinpoint talent
acquisition as the sole means to spur
tangible shifts in its global marketing leadership. Sustained improvement in
corporate competence must at its core be organic, it must be developed and
embedded. This means that at key levels in the organization, next-generation
leaders, whether they come from sales, marketing, finance or operations, will
have to take on the 21st century mindset of a strategic global marketer. Today
few managers in most corporations would make that claim for themselves. Even in
the marketing department itself, a field sales management background is common
Conventional senior executive development
paths can be helpful here but they really speak most effectively to more
generalized corporate management challenges such as innovation, culture, and
Leadership with a capital L. These programs tend to be oriented toward soft skills.
Developing next generation strategic and executional competency in Global Marketing Leadership requires
something else, a development path that integrates together the following
elements:
• Best-in-class thought
leadership from a mix of academics and admired practitioners that is
contemporary and incorporates the latest and biggest marketing issues facing
global marketers today and in the future. A company’s next-generation leaders
have likely already gotten a business 101 MBA, so studying yesterday’s cases
and frameworks is no longer adequate in moving the strategic agility needle.
• Customization to a
company’s own business in ways that adapt outside expertise to the specifics
and nuances of both the complex global organization and the mind-boggling
variety of market environments the company plays in. When it comes to learning,
relevance trumps generalization in today’s high-stakes global environment.
• Fast-cycle concept
application that makes hands-on apprenticeship and in-market activity
inseparable from the next generation leader’s real business issues and global
growth, profitability, differentiation and market share accountabilities.
• Effective cross-border
engagement for future leaders consumed today with the challenges of winning in
vastly different regional markets and operating dimensions. Forming
cross-market, cross-geography, cross-functional learning models is only step
one. The greater challenge is to keep the leadership development process moving
forward in a high-touch, sustained, and high-intensity way.
A New Executive Development Approach:
Global Marketing Leadership
Winning companies will demand a new form of
integrated leadership development solution that enables next-generation
executives to assimilate dramatic new forms of marketing leadership competency
while they tackle the global business challenges of most significance to their
company’s success longer term. The best
academic and practitioner experts, an optimal global learning structure, the
newest engagement technologies and the most relevant learning tools.
All of the pieces must be integrated into a
single tightly-managed development journey for any company’s cohort of
next-generation leaders. Shouldn’t the
development of forward-looking global marketing skills in your next-generation
leaders leverage new-style executive apprenticeship? The process must move
smoothly toward its agreed-upon developmental and business objectives.
Executive learning simply cannot stop at the offsite classroom.
1. In-person global
learning events that are optimally structured and judiciously spaced in
critical markets around the world. The goal is to unleash, amplify and expand the
engagement and learning potential of these in-person learning events by
integrating them into a cohesive overall competency journey.
2. Academic and
practitioner curriculum design that is tightly tied to issues of top priority
in the company’s fast-evolving marketplace. Sessions delivered by leading
academics from across schools, pace-setting frontline business leaders in
relevant fields, and far-flung experts in the global organization itself –
cannot be backward-looking amalgams of conventional practices. They have to be
joint explorations of what initiatives and programs have the best chance of
working in the rapidly unfolding future of 21st century marketing.
3. Leadership curriculum
highly customized for the company’s own global business in terms of its
learning objectives, its structure, and its materials. That means working
side-by-side with a company’s line business leaders to surface global marketing
challenges, develop customized learning cases, and working with instructional
academics and practitioners to create tailored teaching materials.
4. New executive learning
technologies that enable higher-touch interactions between in-person events,
and deliver faster progress in demonstrating real application of marketing
leadership competency and improved results.
A technology platform that leverages exciting new developments in live,
interactive executive engagement from any location. The dynamic media
environment must be professionally produced and tuned to the quality standards,
entertainment styles and pace of today's contemporary information revolution.
5. New mechanisms of
accountability that highlight how well
future leaders are developing new global marketing leadership techniques and
putting them to work in their own very real and immediate business situations.
These are elements that must be orchestrated
for complex global organizations. There is also one more element, which the
corporation must commit to itself to ensure a successful global marketing
leadership:
6. A corporate learning
environment that makes it more than just “ok” for managers to work their
marketing leadership development assignments day after day, week in and week
out for up to two years. This environment must be kept vibrant and sustaining,
by signaling that what each next generation leader does on his or her
development path is far more than an offsite exercise. It has real consequences
to the company’s future. C-suite leaders must actively mentor and ensure
accountability of how well things are progressing.
21st-Century Engagement
Pressure is intensifying on complex global
organizations to find ways for highly dispersed managers to interact and build
close working relationships as they once might have done in a corporate
hallway. Distanced as they are, they still need to build trust and collaborate
easily with people they rarely see face-to-face. And they want to cultivate
more intimate working relationships with top company executives who can move
help them navigate their increasing accountabilities and ultimately move them
into more challenging positions.
But 21st-century marketing skills are best
built with 21st-century tools and technologies that move beyond the old
constraints of co-location and video conferencing. New technologies for close
engagement and engaging information sharing are becoming the next generation’s
preferred style of interaction. Why? Because frequent new technology-enabled
touches maintain more personalized channels, more coordination of activity,
keep people more current and connected, and use time more efficiently.
Like the 21st-century teen, the 21st-century
marketer wants his or her peers and teams to get things done now and in the
moment. . . so everyone can move on to the next important thing. Waiting for
in-person interactions feels quaint, if not plodding, to tomorrow’s marketing
leaders.
* * * * *
Strategic marketing leadership to the degree
we believe complex global organizations will need takes new sorts of knowledge,
at minimum. More than that, however, it really has to become internalized. And
that takes persistence, practice, and peer interactions.
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