The views expressed by marketers in the February issue of B2B Marketing shows me what a challenging and stimulating role chairman for The Chartered Institute of Marketing is going to be over the next year. My appetite and energy for the role is only increased by the opinions given by your interviewees – some of them provocative, but all of them opportunities for us deliver the goods in the way marketers want to see them delivered.
One of your respondents called for us to build into our courses the flexibility for young, ambitious and time-poor marketers to study for qualifications with us, and another request was for The Institute to work harder to keep young marketers engaged. It’s to meet this needs that our Academy was set up, which enables marketers to study flexibly at times that suit them, isn’t limited to the academic year, and has an emphasis throughout on the practical application of content. We’ve devised the structure so that marketers can choose how they want to study – short and intensive residential modular programmes to fit in around work commitments; or blended online programmes, where you can spread the work over the time you need for it.
Another wanted our programmes to be tailored more to the specific and particular needs of companies, and for marketers to emerge from our courses with skills that can be directly applied to the marketplace. Again, through the Academy, we have always offered bespoke Company Programmes where all of our qualifications can be tailored to meet an organisation’s requirements. We will even deliver these programmes to groups of employees within the walls of your own organisation.
Pepe Parra of 2Heads asks for The Institute to take the bull by the horns and begin to offer some form of consultation in terms of environmental guidelines for marketers’. With exactly this need in mind we’ve adopted the Triple Bottom Line principles as a way for responsible marketers to commit to their environmental and social needs, without damaging the financial bottom line. We recently published our Shape the Agenda research paper; The Good, the Bad and the Indifferent, which describes this in detail and offers guidelines specifically for marketers.
Commitment to the environment is high on our agenda because it’s high on our customers’ agendas. Underpinning all of our new content delivery is an emphasis on responsible marketing – knowledge of the laws that affect marketers; ethical business practices; how to create growth, profits and brands whilst maintaining good relationships with customers and stakeholders. This new content, keenly requested by your respondents, appears first in our Shape the Agenda research papers, which are published bi-annually and have recently covered the law, technology and new learning tools. As part of ongoing process, we then introduce these ideas into our courses and eventually into our qualifications.
You asked for more focus on digital media, and courses that recognise the changing media marketplace. In the past year we’ve introduced several new courses in these areas – including The Essentials of Podcasting and Blogging, Mobile Marketing: How to Do It, and an Online Marketing Masterclass – and there are more to come in 2008.
Building the changing media landscape into our academic qualifications takes a little longer. But we’re working hard to implement changes in our qualifications portfolio too, and in fact we launch two fully revised courses from July 2008, the Introductory Certificate in Marketing and the Professional Certificate in Marketing.
The launch marks the end of a period of development where we consulted with academics, members and employers to ensure that the qualifications are relevant for today’s practitioners in our increasingly competitive environment. Additionally, these are the first professional marketing qualifications anywhere in the world to incorporate the new National Occupational Standards in Marketing. Holding these qualifications will give marketers a clear distinction in terms of knowledge and both ethical and legal compliancy.
But we’re aware from the comments that employers want real on-the-job skills too and that’s why we’re working on refocusing our training to more effectively match marketers with the practical skills companies are looking for. To keep the discussions live and up to date, marketers can join our new Online Marketing Communities, where you can find out how other practitioners are grappling with their roles. The communities also give networking opportunities for those members that aren’t able to attend the large number of events that we organise each year in London and at our regional centres. Appointing Sir Paul Judge as our new President is another step towards aligning the skills of the marketer with the needs of business; Sir Paul is well known for his wide experience of business leadership in both the public and private sectors.
And, far from assuming that our ways of training and learning are set in stone, our latest paper discusses new ways to learn and recognises that the teacher-student structure is only one of the ways in which people develop best practice and come up with ideas and innovations. New technologies enable new ways of thinking and new opportunities for training; Learning 2.0, which is published by The Institute this month, discusses how some of these might develop in the future.
My role over the next two years year will be to support the executive and to steer The Institute more squarely into the areas of marketing practice that we’ve recently begun to explore more thoroughly, and I would welcome more comments along the lines your respondents gave last week – they are an invaluable insight into what marketers in the B2B community really want. I hope some of the initiatives I’ve outlined above will begin to meet the needs of marketers in the B2B sphere and beyond.
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