Why ?
Outperforming the competition in the relevant needs of the markets is a key differentiator . In competitive markets the benchmark is continuously rising and upgrading your own level is without alternative.
When market needs should drive your performance, then excellence in encompassing all energy towards the market should drive your organization. This drive can be labeled as Marketing Excellence.
What ?
Marketing Excellence roots in culture, systems and people:
→ Culture of consequently thinking from outside-in
→ Systems which are designed to encompass all energy towards markets
→ People with the right personality, capabilities and empowerment.
How?
Becoming excellent in marketing as an entire organization requires a systemic approach encountering various fields in a stringent process of change and needs to be grounded in a consistent articulated strategy .
No organization can be entirely organized by markets from the front- to the back-end. The more important it is to build a holistic system that ensures market-focus beyond organizational structures which are often build according to responsibilities for products, technologies and functions.
Key elements to create market-focus from the front-end to the back are:
→ Strategic and operative processes guided by market/customer information
→ Empowerment and capability of entrepreneurship towards markets.
Excellence in marketing processes starts with an deeply embedded attitude of consequently thinking all processes from market-front-end towards back-end and not the other way around. This requires to let market and customer feedback – proactively – guide the further evolution of your business. This is easily said, but only few companies have for example truely embedded market feedback programs in their strategic and operativ processes but rather rely on opinions.
Excellence in people doesn’t start with experts, it starts with potential and growth. By the way it is also not limited to people in Marketing & Sales.
It starts with identifying and developing people with the required personality and mindset. A gap in a market-focussed personality and mindset can not be compensated by an excellent performance in technical or functional tasks.
It commences with building individual and collective capabilities via sustainable on&off-the job education systems for mindsets, roles, skills, tools and practices. Leveraging both external and internal benchmark practice in an open system engaging various stakeholders.
It unfolds into market-focused entrepreneurship through tutoring by leaders and role models in the business context.
In a nutshell:
Marketing Excellence:
Strategic framework & Change process
which is led by the corporate leadership
What to do?
The essence of my 25 years work is that I have seen many initiatives with good intention and blueprints fail. Reasons in hind side were:
→ Lack of a systemic understanding of Marketing Excellence
→ Failing in a sustainable drive by leadership across all hierarchies
→ Competency gaps in designing sustainable capability building programs
→ Missing support for the leadership in facilitating large scale interventions
I have also been part of making it happen – including hard learnings.
The key components were
→ a clearly defined and leadership committed Marketing Excellence Strategy → combined with a lasting Marketing Excellence Change Concept.
How can I help you ?
I had the privilege to learn by experience things I had not imagined to exist.
I have started in my carreer, like many of us, with high motivation to create impact and change. The results were often limited because my scope of how change happens in organizations was a bottom-up and inside-out perspective from my specific area of responsibility.
In the next phase as a business leader I enjoyed and endured major change projects from inside and learned from failure and success. An extra value ist that this gives me the ability to relate to the business context of a project instead of being disconnected in an ivory tower like lifetime consultants.
My scope extended, when I moved to roles where I personally had the responsibility to design and facilitate large scale interventions and capability building programs aiming for excellence for the top management.
This often hard learning changed my perspective on how a system works, how they change and what makes the difference between failure and success.
After 25 years of in-company work I now have the privilege to spend my time with conceptualizing and sharing on the subject of achieving excellence in marketing through strategy and change.
If you seek for my advice or counsel feel free to contact me.
Your comments are also very welcome !