The one-sentence summary

Marketing and marketers play a critical role in creating the customer value and demand that leads to growth, so it’s not enough for the marketing department to be organised effectively – the whole company needs to be.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS THE GROWTH DRIVERS

  • The book claims to be the definitive guide to transforming marketing capabilities.
  • Marketing and marketers play a critical role in creating the customer value and demand that leads to growth. It’s not enough for the marketing department to be organised effectively to create better customer value – the whole company needs to be.
  • The core disciplines and practices of effective marketing are explained, along with how an organisation can transform itself using them.
  • Their 3D approach involves Defining strategy, Developing solutions, and Driving embedding.
  • The Growth Propeller is a process for getting all this done:

~ The Outer Ring involves business objectives and performance, segmentation and portfolio strategy, brand positioning and architecture, innovative value propositions, integrated communications, route-to-market, and customer experience delivery.

~ The Connecting Ring involves strategy and planning.

~ The Inner Core involves insight and engagement.

  • The Training Trap is where companies focus on individual skill development and fail to wire the marketing function into the organisation.
  • The Brand Learning Wheel shows how to drive marketing capability through processes, skills, organisation, people, and culture.
  • Learning occurs 70% on the job, 20% from feedback and role models, and just 10% from formal learning programmes.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Marketing with a big M typically operates at the functional level, and with a small m at the company level.
  • To get your company growing do you want to lift the floor (ensure consistent best practice) or raise the ceiling (stretch capabilities)?
  • Five star marketing leaders have a restless customer obsession, a bold and inspiring vision, are humble, honest, and have great attention to detail.
  • There are many Measurement Traps, including marketing = communications (it doesn’t); art v. science (creativity shouldn’t triumph over analytics); data v. insight (the former is useless without the latter); time lags (data cannot be acted upon if it’s too late); and commercial knowledge (huge numbers of marketing papers involve basic miscalculations and misunderstandings of fundamental concepts such as margin and ROI).
  • Consensus seems to be emerging that instead of people making decisions in the sequence of feel, think, do, actual behaviour seems to be based more on a model of feel, do, post-rationalise.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • To any experienced marketer, it’s all a bit obvious.
  • Perhaps not surprisingly, the book is obsessed with growth.