Marketing Case Studies
Advertising/Communications Training: ROI
Client: Global durable consumer goods company
Business Situation: The company is on a path to capture global market leadership. The strategy is to transform the organization from a manufacturing to a marketing orientation. The CMO was concerned that uneven quality of advertising could not support an aggressive slate of new product introductions.
Business Need: The new SVP Global Marketing identified a number of obstacles to the global marketing operation being able to support the corporate strategy. These included:
- An urgent need to build the image of the company and its brands; the existing campaign was viewed as progress but still fell short of the mark.
- Senior managements realization that you cannot rely on an untrained organization to produce consistently high quality output. As one VP said: I cannot clone myself fast enough to deal with the volume of communications work.
- A general frustration with the lack of a common language and process for evaluating creative submissions, as well as practice applying that. The corporation had > 100 marketers in head office and > 200 in the regions who were lacking fundamental skills and experience with advertising development.
Why CCC was hired: The SVP was aware that several CCC consultants had Procter & Gamble experience running a dedicated Advertising Development Group, and were intimately familiar with common issues line managers and their ad agencies run into when working together. Peggy Belanger and Henneke Cats were asked to do an organization assessment and propose practical approaches to start the turn-around. Both Henneke and Peggy have held Senior P&G Management and consulting roles in the US, Canada, Europe and South America.
Consulting Project: Leveraging their own and CCC colleagues experience, Peggy and Henneke worked with a dedicated client team to get some pilot programs up and running quickly. Through a series of iterations, refinements were made to customize the program to both global and local needs. The key focus was to: 1) give marketers a simple process and language, 2) spend 70% of the time practicing on real cases, and 3) where possible, support actual market launches. Specific program goals were for marketers to learn and apply:
- Communication strategy, communication brief and how these relate to equity;
- Advertising evaluation tools which can be used across different media channels;
- How to evaluate executional drama (e.g. for TV, print, outdoor, interactive and online) and how to create channel synergy;
- How to organize their advertising evaluation comments and clearly communicate actionable points to their Agency and company managers.
Consulting Outcome: Two years into the program, > 300 marketers have participated world wide. Graduates rate the program consistently 4.7+ (5 point scale), and it is viewed as one of the most rewarding training experiences in the company. Talking about the programs success, the CMO has said we will focus...on building marketing community and marketing capacity this is how we will improve ROI.
The author, Henneke Cats, has over 20 years of true expertise in advertising and communications and building brands.
Contact Information
Call or email Dick Bruder, CCC President/CEO, at (513) 233-0011 or dbruder@cincconsult.com.
