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Why Imparta
When founder Richard Barkey started Imparta in 1997, the goal was to provide an antidote to an industry that was – and remains – focused on delivering events rather than results.
CNBC Interview
Imparta CEO, Richard Barkey, raises questions all business leaders should ask.
Business Impact
What clients say about our impact on their business.
O2 Marketing Academy
The Business Situation
When British Telecom demerged its mobile telecoms operation, ‘Cellnet’, the newly independent company faced a huge challenge to establish itself rapidly in a highly competitive market.
Some distinctive ‘breakthrough’ marketing was needed and the company achieved this through an innovative ‘O2’ brand imagery and concept. This enabled the company to build awareness, expand its customer base and rise to become one of the leading players in UK’s growing mobile telecoms market.
However, having achieved high brand awareness and a new mix of customers, O2’s management knew that to sustain the brand they needed to go beyond imagery and differentiate by finding superior ways to satisfy customers. This could only be achieved through O2’s staff, so a key plank of its business strategy became a commitment to develop its people.
As part of this strategy, in 2004, Marketing Director Cath Keers decided to establish an internal marketing academy. This was to help build capability in the company, and give support to individuals working to meet very stretching objectives.
Unlike many companies, in O2 the marketing organisation holds overall responsibility for keeping the company customer focused - not only via the strategic end of planning and defining propositions and campaigns, but also by liaising with other O2 units to ensure the end-to-end implementation really delivers on the brand promise.
As with all service organisations, the challenge is to strive for continuous improvement and the overarching business purpose for the Academy was to move marketing excellence further along to create ‘the best marketing team in the U.K. – bar none'.
Imparta had already established a highly successful Sales Academy for O2 which was driving excellence in sales effectiveness and, following a competitive pitch, it was appointed as the partner to create and manage the Marketing Academy with O2.
The Challenges
O2’s pre-existing marketing success initially presented a challenge to Imparta when considering the approach and overall learning objectives for establishing an O2 Marketing Academy.
Imparta’s mission to improve sales and marketing effectiveness in client companies, is easier when clear and defined skill gaps are draining company performance. That was not the case in O2 – as it boasted an increasing list of marketing awards!
O2’s recruitment policies had selected staff for their proven experience, so whereas many corporate ‘Academies’ take graduates or work starters and give them ‘101’ training, the challenge in designing O2’s Marketing Academy was to find ways to increase effectiveness when individual marketers were already highly competent.
Also, O2’s large marketing organisation covered the spectrum of marketing sub-disciplines, hence marketers’ roles and skills varied greatly, with many being very specialist. It became apparent that to improve marketing effectiveness, the largest organisational ‘win’ would be made by ensuring marketing was truly holistic and ‘joined up’ seamlessly across the specialist units.
So a set of main objectives evolved for the Marketing Academy:
- to strengthen and broaden the capability of the marketing organisation;
- to improve interfaces between teams and other O2 units;
- to engage and energise participants around their development;
- and to differentiate O2 through the effective use of customer insight.
To drive the strategic development of the academy from the O2 side, a Head of the Marketing Academy was appointed: Fiona Maktari works with Imparta on design and development, including marshalling relevant O2 internal subject matter experts, whilst also tracking quality and reporting progress to the top management of the directorate.
Before launching any Academy work, introductory sessions took place with managers to gain champions amongst the management tiers; explain the Academy purpose, structure and content, and prepare the organisation to participate fully in the Academy opportunity.
The Marketing Academy
Imparta’s core philosophy of pursuing business impact implies assessing the company’s capability needs from the broad perspective of its business objectives, and then determining the skills at unit and individual level.
As a result each of the different ‘phases’ of the Academy to date have differed as they have been built to match specific business objectives:
Phase 1 – Customer Orientation
The objective for this phase was to create alignment amongst different marketing teams by allowing them to mix to share experiences and learning as they considered the core principle driving O2’s business strategy ‘Customers at the Heart of O2’.
Marketers at all levels and across all units took a hands-on course on customer insight to build a common approach and language for exploring and building customer insights to underpin marketing activities.
Phase 2 – Accelerating Marketing Capability
This phase pursued the objective of broadening and deepening marketing functional expertise and featured a series of courses on specialist marketing topics.
Course topics relevant to increasing marketing excellence had been identified by the Head of Strategy and discussed further with O2 marketing unit heads. The topics mapped to a set of competencies derived from O2’s own marketing activity requirements and job roles, internal research with managers, and external research by organisations such as the Chartered Institute.of Marketers’ and new National Standards for marketers’ roles.
Expert specialist facilitators were chosen to bring in best practice and examples beyond the telecoms industry as a catalyst to think beyond sector norms.
Phase 3 – Accelerating Organisational Capability
Before the programme developed into its third phase, participants were surveyed to verify their next expectations for the Academy. Respondents clearly favoured learning they could apply immediately on their current job, rather than training geared towards gaining a qualification.
In parallel, O2’s Head of Marketing Academy, Fiona Maktari personally exchanged views with non-competing organisations and this, plus inputs from varied internal and external sources, created a consensus view on the competencies are needed for high performing, market-driven organisations to drive profitable growth and create exceptional value for customers and shareholders.
As a result of this research, the priority capabilities to develop for the phase were identified as those which would accelerate business and personal performance overall. These included strategic thinking, commercial acumen, coaching and developing high performance.
Measurement
The effectiveness of academy courses and projects are assessed via the Kirkpatrick model of reactions, behaviour change and business impact.
Prior to a programme phase, KPIs are set by O2 for training uptake, timescales and quality of the training, as scored by attendees.
Reporting on a monthly and quarterly basis covers:
- Customer Satisfaction scores – on course content and quality of facilitation
- Programme uptake, in terms of attendance by individuals and teams
- Test results of individual’s knowledge built on course content - to take the learning beyond the classroom and embed it in memory, online reinforcement activities follow the workshop sessions.
- Key insights and learnings about how the training was received, including participants quotes.
In addition, information is captured on:
- Behaviour changes – self-reporting is captured online, by manager and coaching observations. The role of managers is in fact key in proactively creating opportunities to transfer learning into new behaviours.
- Business impact – self-reporting captured online and via management observation, and live business issues considered in class are progressed through further group development of ideas and action projects.
An O2 wide internal staff survey conducted annually also contains elements relevant to personal development and the quality of marketers’ interaction with other O2 units, and moving this score upward was also set as a key tracking indicator for the Marketing Academy.
Results
Customer Satisfaction has exceeded targets set for each of the phases, even though the targets have been moved progressively upward.
Reporting by team or self on training impacts has typically provided specific examples of what areas of the learning or specific tools have been used to change processes, behaviours arising in planning, design of campaigns or marketing collateral, ideas for innovation or ways of assessing the commercial aspects of marketing activities.
Forward Path
As word of popular marketing courses travelled within the company, other non-marketing units have asked to be included in the Academy or specific courses, helping to achieve the objective of developing holistic ways of working in O2.
The Academy continues to evolve as it aligns with the changing demands of O2’s marketplace, while also taking care to reinforce the key processes and behaviours the company wishes to embed in its marketing DNA.
The advantage of Imparta’s Academy approach is that the large-scale, cumulative effect of both aligning individual efforts and directing them towards real business issues address the shortcomings of much traditional marketing training where the theory taught fails to transfer into practical use. As the Academy has become a vehicle to bring the best of O2’s thinking together it continues to promote ‘joined up’ marketing across different disciplines and units and world-class performance from strategy through to implementation.
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