Bench strength: How Freedom Furniture, Wesfarmers Health, REA Group CMOs are keeping the crazy pace on team capability and next for the Australian Marketing Institute’s skills assessment and capability program

Host: Nadia Cameron, Editor - Marketing | Associate Publisher

Amid all the hype, excitement and trepidation around digital, marketing automation, data utilisation and now AI coming into marketing, is the very real need to build team capability and empowerment to actually use the tools effectively – and in a way that delivers business outcomes. As Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, told Mi3 recently: “As AI is a very new technology, it can be a big challenge for teams at large to embrace because they don’t know how to do it. Educating them in the process of embracing AI, on the tools, and actually making investments in your team to get them the comfort to experiment, is the responsibility of a marketing leadership team.”

But it’s not just tech changing the shape of marketing execution. New channels and connectivity to customer – as well as higher expectations of said customer –  are demanding marketers build a diverse range of brand, people and specialist skill sets. Then there’s the relentless scrutiny of marketing effectiveness and budgets requiring ever stronger commercial nous. Mi3 and the AMI’s Marketing & Customer Benchmarks FY2023 Outlook report last June of 105 Chief Marketing, Customer and Growth Officers highlighted the changes they’re preparing for – team structures and shifting KPI’s among them, with customer lifetime value metrics surging for many.   

All this makes it imperative marketing teams run continuous learning and capability development loops. Two CMOs striving for this are Freedom Furniture’s Jason Piggott and Wesfarmers Health’s Corrina Brazel. Quick to jump into the Australian Marketing Institute’s new skills assessment tool, 12 months after the launch of its Competency Framework, both see a need for more formalised learning programs that don’t just cover new specialist skills, but can also improve core marketing knowledge across their teams. While the AMI’s Competency Framework provides those foundations and learning structures, the assessment tool is about having productive, proactive conversations with teams while also holding up a mirror to your own strengths and weaknesses, both say.

Per AMI CEO, Bronwyn Heys: “Modern marketers need to be bench ready. They need to be ready for anything – for the market, for the consumer.”

No less keen to pursue learning rigour is REA Group, whose GM of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, says has a “very feedback hungry culture” and commitment to deep, specialist skills. A one-size-fits-all program, however, hasn’t been the right option, nor has a pure marketing strain to capability development. Instead, the company has been building out an internal university that recognises certain skills as important across the business. 

Tune into this latest Mi3 podcast episode as we unpack the pros and cons of skills assessment, specialist versus generalist capability building, and how marketing leaders encourage continuous learning across their teams from the bottom up – while also not forgetting to skill up themselves.

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