The Marketing ©ouncil

We helped The Marketing ©ouncil bring to life the conditions in which innovation can flourish.

The challenge

The Marketing ©ouncil was set up to help its 150 member businesses expand through marketing, with a focus on innovation. As a culture / climate specialist, they asked Perspectiv’s Andy Wilkins to help them better understand innovation ‘culture’. The then Chairman of Guinness plc and Head of the Innovation Group, Tony Greener, wrote:

‘I want to stress one thing I personally believe is a key to successful innovation – that is that consumer or customer insight leading to innovation is not fundamentally about processes, systems or research, but about company culture.’

The Marketing ©ouncil was focused on three questions about making a company truly innovative and Perspectiv helped with the first of these:

1. How do we create an innovation culture throughout the organisation?

2. How do we develop in-depth understanding of consumers and customers?

3. How do we exploit ideas quickly and profitably?

How we made a difference

Perspectiv helped to bring the whole topic of the culture of innovation to life for the Marketing ©ouncil. In many organisations there is an initiative to improve innovation which does not realise its full potential – one of the main reasons is because culture is muddled up with ‘climate’.

Perspectiv showed the Marketing ©ouncil that climate not culture is the fundamental psychology of the company – the everyday practices that create the ‘atmosphere’ of the place. It is this atmosphere that focuses and motivates employee behaviour and the degree to which innovation will flourish or wither on the vine.

The distinction between climate and culture was brought to life based on 50 years of research and development as well as previous application with organisations such as GE, IBM, Leo Burnett and 3M using a tool called the Situational Outlook Questionnaire (SOQ).

The results

Perspectiv used the SOQ to measure the climate for innovation in many of the Marketing ©ouncil member organisations and as one CEO pointed out:

‘It’s interesting that as I metaphorically fly over London at 40,000 feet, everything looks great, but it is only at street level that one gets to see the real challenges.’

Two key climate for innovation challenges were identified:

1. How to build a superior innovation climate in British organisations?

2. How to build boardroom leadership support?

Perspectiv’s work with the Marketing ©ouncil developed its members’ understanding that the focus needs to be climate rather than culture and that climate can be changed while culture can’t. Additionally, the leadership practices necessary to fan the flames and spread innovation can be learned – Perspectiv introduced the Marketing ©ouncil to the dimensions of a high performance climate and their connection with leadership behaviours.

Several member organisations that were at a point of innovation maturity to think about developing their own climate for innovation undertook climate assessments including Boots, British Steel, Bull Information Systems, GlaxoSmithKline, Ford and Reckitt Benckiser.