Let’s talk about instinct.
Recession hits. Budgets tighten. And training — capability, coaching, development — is first on the chopping block.
It feels like the sensible move. You need to prioritise. You’ve got to protect performance.
But we’ve been reading this excellent piece from Tracksuit, and it hit a nerve — in a good way.
We’re proud to be the chosen partner for the PZ Cussons Marketing Growth Academy, a multi-market, multi-phase training programme designed to raise the floor, create a common language and build the strategic muscles needed for sustainable growth.
If you’re going to build world-class marketing academies, you need a world-class marketing capability team.
“When you’re the only one driving marketing capability in your company, who do you turn to?”
It’s a question we hear time and again. Marketing capability leaders are often the unsung heroes of their organisations, pushing for transformation, upskilling teams and embedding better marketing behaviours. But it can be a lonely job. That’s exactly why we created the Marketing Capability Campfire.
The Edrington marketing team was facing a significant moment of change. With organisational shifts on the horizon, there was an opportunity to step back from the day-to-day and focus on the bigger picture. The team needed space to reflect on the personal and professional impacts of a transformative year, celebrate their successes and recharge for the future.
This wasn’t a standard business retreat. Edrington’s vision was something far more personal — a chance to recognise the journey the team had been on, thank them for their hard work and create an environment where they felt supported, valued, and empowered for their next chapter – whatever that might be.
The leadership team at Clorox recognised that to keep their brands profitable long-term in a commoditised categories like cleaning and personal care, they needed a strategic, commercially astute marketing team.
The problem? Most of the team hadn’t been formally trained in marketing. Without foundational theory and critical marketing skills, they were delivering hit-and-miss marketing plans that fell short of the consistency Clorox needed to drive business performance. There was also a gap in customer understanding and sell-in skills, meaning that even their strongest marketing plans lacked the commercial follow-through needed to make a real impact.
That’s where we came in. To raise the floor for Clorox, we designed a fully tailored, end-to-end learning journey to equip their team to deliver brilliantly thought-through marketing plans and effectively commercialise them, making the marketing function at Clorox a key driver of long-term profitable growth for the business.
C&C had an exceptional marketing team delivering standout brand marketing campaigns. The problem was the impact was falling short. Why? They weren’t successfully bringing their sales team or retailers along on the journey to support their brilliant marketing activity.
After a closer look, we uncovered the root of the issue: the team hadn’t been trained to craft commercially astute propositions.
They weren’t winning over key decision-makers: retailers and customers. So, while the marketing hit the mark, it was getting blocked from reaching consumers because they weren’t swaying the gatekeepers.
The mission? To raise the floor on commercial capabilities by training the marketing team at C&C how to create sell-ins that buyers simply can’t say no to.
Founded by supersmart duo Steven Melford and Simon Garnett, The Forge is an insight-driven innovation consultancy, highly regarded by top marketing businesses like Diageo, Innocent and PepsiCo for their ability to translate what people will care about in the future into commercial returns.
Although their reputation and business performance was strong, The Forge team had identified a need to shift from transactional relationships to meaningful, personal connections that would set the business up for long-term success.
Their challenge was that they hadn’t been intentional about giving their client relationships the time & effort needed to unlock that next-level quality that would their business performance. They had a few long-term partnerships, these took years to develop and were the exception, not the norm.
Wavemaker is an integral player in WPP’s global media network, and has been one of the UK’s leading media agencies since 2017. From superstar strategists to formidable media buyers, it’s no surprise that Wavemaker has never struggled to recruit top-tier agency folk.
Wavemaker’s challenge was developing their top layer of high potential senior talent from being experts in their fields into being effective leaders.
In 2021, Neil Skinner, Marketing Director, led the design of a new brand planning process, complete with a set of tools & frameworks to support it. The new process was excellent. The challenge was ensuring these new processes and tools were effectively adopted and embedded within the team.