Marketers should be changing faster than marketing; We are launching a marketing transformation practice
Because HOW is more important than WHAT, and to do better Marketing, we need better Marketing Organisations.
When we started REBORRN with Costas, my co-founder, we chose to stay away from our old job as admen and focus on helping visionary organisations thrive in the digital economy, building a different kind of management consultancy.
During the past five years since we started REBORRN, we have had the opportunity to work with leading global organisations helping them transform their multi-market teams by changing their habits, building new processes, changing how they build capabilities to eventually change how they work, to do things better, faster, and have happier teams. Here’s a brief taste:
But our background in the marketing world stayed with us both in terms of expertise and network. Zooming out and looking back at the work we’ve been delivering all these years, we realised that a big chunk of the work was about standing by the side of global marketing leaders to support their vision for change. We are helping organisations like The Coca-Cola Company, Philip Morris International, Bayer’s Consumer Health, L’Oreal, and others change the structure of their Marketing Organisations, introduce new ways of working, deploy Agile frameworks at scale, change the way they build their plans, rethink how to build their collective capability, introduce new marketing models, build new revenue streams and even redesign their product innovation process.
What we did this year was just look back, connect the dots, and bring all of that together, along with a world-class team that is uniquely positioned to build such a specialty practice.
I have to admit that in this journey, we found that helping these organisations change how they bring great work to life versus doing great work for them (aka advertising) was way more fulfilling and impactful at the same time. As the old Chinese proverb goes:
Give a man a fish you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
While exploring this very niche space, we were surprised to find out that there are only a handful of firms globally specialising in helping CMOs shape the future of their organisations.
And I think that’s because of this notion that I have previously written that while marketers are obsessed with discussing how others (consumers) change, they spend disproportionally less time about how marketers should be changing to catch up with the changing consumer behaviour, that is fueled by the evolution of technology.
For all the above reasons, we are launching a Specialty Practice on Marketing Transformation with the core thesis:
Marketers should be changing faster than Marketing.
To do that, we’re bringing together a team of world-class talents with extremely diverse backgrounds combining our strengths as a team. Working with this practice, organisations will have access to
- Organisational Designers with deep expertise in building more agile team Operating Systems.
- Marketing Strategists with a multidecade background in industry and agency side that can speak the same language as a marketing leader.
- Management Consultants can help a CMO uncover opportunities to tap into new revenue streams.
- Internal Communication Experts who work alongside designers and writers to help turn a vision into a powerful story that will inspire a marketing community.
- A cross-functional team of Makers from product designers, software engineers, and data analysts that can help build solutions that will automate parts of the work, prototype and test new ideas and more.
And we are doing this with a radically different approach to problem solving compared to anything else we’ve seen in the market.
- We have an end to end approach to problem-solving versus the usual “hands off” approach by consultancies which mainly produces Powerpoints. We like to stay with our clients from strategy, to idea to implementation employing a diverse team of experts, fit for each stage.
- We have a radically different approach to work, that is summarised in one word: “Co-creation”. We like to skip the traditional client-consultant relationship by working together with our clients to produce great outcomes. We are not fond of the idea that a senior consultant is smarter than a seasoned executive and can solve their problems in a vacuum. We are using, design thinking principles and design sprint methodology to solve hard problems, better & faster working together with (and not for) our clients.
- We have a different approach to pricing, focusing on results rather than effort. We are not fans of time & material priced engagements. These pricing models, where one needs to invent manhours to make a decent profit, are favouring effort over result, and result in never-ending engagements. We are in favour of value-based and sometimes performance-based pricing that reward the impact, and sometimes the speed of execution.
Below you can explore our offering in detail, and some practical examples on how this team can help you transform your marketing organisation.
1. Strategy & Transformation
We want to work with our partners to craft innovative, future-ready transformation journeys that align with their vision and goals. Our hands-on, tailored approach fuels change that keeps them at the forefront of the industry.
- Marketing Vision & Long-term strategy planning.
We help define a clear marketing vision and create actionable, adaptive long-term strategies to achieve your goals. But we don’t want to stop at building beautiful ppts; we like to take things to the end, which is how an organisation turns a vision into a compelling story that cascades down to hundreds or thousands of people with a state-of-the-art employee engagement plan.
- Experience-first Consumer Engagement Models.
We help redesign, future-proof and adapt your marketing models to the changing consumer behaviour. The key tensions of the past decade (Digital, Social, two-way communications) are not the bets of the next decade.
- End-to-End Marketing Process Design.
Having a deep understanding of the marketing process but also the complexity of large organisations, we are helping reduce the time to market a Campaign from months (or years sometimes) to weeks, using Design Thinking, Design Sprint methodology and Agile Principles.
- Product Innovation Process Re-engineering
We revamp product innovation processes, fostering creativity and accelerating time-to-market. The innovation process is a hard challenge when it comes to physical products from organisations with massive distribution and global scale. Being able to move fast to react to changing market dynamics, as well as being able to test solutions in the market before spending tens of millions in production, is critical to the bottom line of most CPG/FMCG companies.
2. Business Design
We want to shape sustainable growth through ecosystem business planning, rapid prototyping, and portfolio management. Our expertise bridges strategy and execution, driving tangible results.
- Ecosystem Business Planning.
We design thriving business ecosystems, leveraging partnerships and synergies for growth. Business planning can often take too long and become an endless cycle of alignment meetings. Our solution is to facilitate rapid co-creation with all parties and stakeholders involved, eliminating the need for endless meetings. This approach results in a more effective and efficient process, with 100% buy-in from all parties involved.
- Growth Strategy / Portfolio Management & Go to Market.
We develop actionable growth strategies and go-to-market plans to capture new opportunities. Again to be able to stand by the side of Marketers, we combine a team of management consultants and analysts that can help put a solid plan on paper with people that have a deep background in the industry that can help get things to the end and co-ordinate internal teams and external partners (trade marketing firms, market research, media agencies, creative shops etc.) to deliver what is on the paper before consumers’ eyes.
- Rapid prototyping & real market testing
Validating ideas in the physical products world is quite more challenging compared to services and technology. But there are ways to test a new product or a new route to market before making a significant investment. Right now, testing is limited to quantitative research, focus groups and market research panels. We want to change that. Here’s an example of work that we can share publicly with The Coca-Cola Company in Austria or with Vodafone Europe.
- Customer Experience Strategy
If the past decade, marketers shifted their thinking from TV-only communication plans to TV-first plans with the introduction of Digital and the power of social media platforms. We see another shift happening right now as we shift our thinking away from campaigns focusing on human-centric experiences. In other words, the marketing industry spent the better part of the last decade shifting from TVCs to Content Calendars; this decade’s bet is to shift our thinking from Content Calendars to Consumer Journeys and build relevant brand experiences. Our teams are helping put that thinking into practice by helping organisations map their customer journeys, unveil game-changing insights and build long-lasting consumer experiences that drive ROI.
3. Marketing Team Operating Systems
As part of this area of services, we aspire to empower marketing teams with agile, efficient operating systems, enabling seamless collaboration, robust decision-making, and impactful results.
- Organisational Structure and People
We align your organizational structure and talent with your marketing objectives and market dynamics. In a world the pace of change is increasingly faster, you cannot afford to keep going with siloed teams and complex Org-Charts of the past century.
- Agile Transformation & Ways of Working
We want to change the daily habits of multi-market teams using agile frameworks to boost productivity and adaptability. Understanding the key principles of how fast-growing companies operate, we want to borrow things that work in the tech ecosystem, adapt to the complexity of large organisations, co-create with the teams internally and deploy first with smaller experiments before scaling.
- Tools & Process Redesign
I can’t stress the role of technology automation enough as a catalyst for productivity and transparency. And this is where our promise of building a hybrid of consultants and makers comes to life. It’s one thing to design a solution on paper, and it’s a whole other thing to bring this to life in the most efficient way, either by working with your existing partners (be it Microsoft) or using no-code tools to build and iterate faster.
- Employee Experience
No transformation is successful unless the employee experience journey is subpar. For example, a poor employee experience during the first hundred days of onboarding can lead to high churn rates. Whether you believe it or not, most people decide if they are going to remain at an organisation during their first six months. Our teams help marketing organisations design and implement state-of-the-art employee experiences from recruitment and onboarding to employee engagement and offboarding. Here’s an episode from our podcast series on Employee experience discussing the importance of onboarding.
- Marketing Capabilities Transformation
We want to elevate team capabilities through targeted growth frameworks, enabling success in the digital economy. Most organisations perceive capability building through boring pieces of training, knowledge bases that no one pays attention and expensive trips to Cannes and fora. We believe that learning and working are not two separate things. We take on the challenge to design and deploy end-to-end frameworks that weigh on on-the-job experiences to grow the marketers of the future, be it opportunities for Short term assignments, dynamic resource allocation and merging performance discussions with learning agendas.
Wrapping up
We know very well that the above offering touches a niche of a handful of companies and a handful of people among them. But if we make it to move the needle even just a little bit, this is going to have a massive impact on these organisations but, more importantly, on the kind of marketing that gets before consumers’ eyes.
If you're interested to know more, drop us a line, and one of our consultants will jump on a quick call with you and your team.
