Enabling marketing best practice
Our client, a global pharmaceutical company, wanted to share the best practice of its outstanding marketers to ensure excellence across all marketing teams. They had two main objectives:
- To instil excellent marketing practice, raising the performance level of everyone to that of the best performers.
- To create a strategy-led suite of resources, that would be flexible and high-impact for all marketers.
A new Marketing Academy would become our client’s hub for an engaging and effective learning experience - one where learners could choose and access the appropriate support they needed, when they needed it. The Academy would provide on-demand, flexible learning, and become the heart of a learning community.
Spreading best practice
The aim of the Marketing Academy was to go beyond just delivering a really good training programme. Our client wanted to prompt real behaviour change.
While there were already plenty of examples of outstanding marketing practices, inevitably in a large business there was a range of knowledge, capability and experience. The Academy was intended to bridge those gaps and provide an environment for marketers to build knowledge and share insights and experience.
To identify and target individual learning needs, marketers complete a self-evaluation to highlight their own target areas for improvement. They can then go to the learning platform and select the relevant resources.
Managers can also set training for individuals and teams, tailoring to need and time available.
Strategy-led, flexible resources
The Academy is based on nine marketing capabilities—such as ‘Customer-centric approach’, ‘Gaining insights from data’, and ‘Applying strategic and critical thinking’—all of which connect with the overall business strategy.
Each capability comprises three behaviours, focusing on the actions marketers need to take in order to deliver impact.
These are also aligned to competency levels – foundational, intermediate and advanced – to help learners find appropriately tailored content, and give them a progression pathway.
The on-demand e-learning is bite-sized, and the resources are flexible and adaptable to suit the needs of the specific team (global/regional/ country) or individual.
Making complex content accessible and engaging
We were tasked with creating new content based on a huge array of existing source material (including hours of video explanations by SMEs, as well as a range of internal and external assets).
We needed to turn this into an engaging, accessible and user-friendly experience. We also needed to map the content to their existing marketing framework, clarifying any ambiguities, and fitting it all together seamlessly.
To deliver this and achieve the business objectives with impact, our approach was:
- Create a Marketing Academy hub
We designed a branded identity for the Academy, and built a resource hub in Sharepoint. This became the heart of the learning community.
- Provide a flexible, impactful learning experience
We designed learning content to fit four types of learning experience for each of the nine capabilities:
- On-demand learning
Bite-sized, Netflix-style modules with short, focused episodes. Learners choose what’s most relevant to them and can watch all-at-once or dip in and out at their own pace. - Peer learning discussions
Flexible discussion sheets for solo, pair, or group use. Some are activity-based, others prompt reflection — all designed to spark meaningful conversation and insight. - Application experiences
Interactive workshops and “meetings in a box” with facilitator guides, hands-on activities, and tools like Miro boards. Designed for adaptability, with optional elements to suit different needs. - On-the-job learning
Practical performance support tools that learners can pull as needed. Simple, engaging, and designed to support real-time application.
Focused on outcomes
The Marketing Academy provides an outstanding learning experience focused on strategic business objectives. It supports our client’s marketers and teams globally to make meaningful changes, focused on actions and behaviours, to deliver best practice marketing.
