Chapter 11. Marketing Knowledge Centers

• How can everyone in your company, in every country, on every brand and business, have access to the marketing wisdom, information, and lessons learned?

• How do you capture and share corporate knowledge?

• How can you accelerate the organizational and individual learning curve?

We have defined the new marketing as a process and a science rather than an ad hoc, communications-based art. The process and science of marketing are fueled by shared knowledge and information: knowledge of the customer, insights derived from this knowledge, information about the programs developed from these insights, and analysis of the results as measured by both customer response and enterprise revenue and profitability.

Most experienced marketers understand this. Nevertheless, senior managers tell us repeatedly they believe knowledge management has been one of the most neglected areas of the marketing discipline. Knowledge has been used to advance narrow agendas, such as the product manager’s need to research the acceptance of a new feature, or Brand Manager A’s need to achieve a performance edge over Brand Manager B. It hasn’t been used to advance the broad agenda of generating shared insights and shared knowledge assets from which the entire enterprise can derive a return.

The Marketing Knowledge Center (MKC) is an important first step to enable an organization to systematically harness marketing knowledge to achieve growth. The MKC provides the organization with an immediate, sustainable competitive advantage: speed of learning. Accelerating the speed at which knowledge and information are shared within an organization is the equivalent of compounding interest on your investment in marketing capability by leading all marketing practitioners to the top of the learning curve quickly.

A marketer can save time and wasteful expenditures by understanding what has worked in other circumstances—or what did not work—and why, or by reusing templated knowledge for basic tasks. This knowledge enhancement enables marketers to accomplish their routine tasks quickly, freeing them and their teams to apply themselves to more important value-added activities.

Another advantage of the MKC is that the enterprise can capture the “corporate” memory and not rely solely on individuals as owners of the knowledge base. Companies can give their marketers the ability and tools to learn on the job, get all key data quickly, and hit the ground running on a new brand or assignment.

What Is a Marketing Knowledge Center?

An MKC is a comprehensive corporate digital library containing all the data needed for marketing to function at peak efficiency and effectiveness. An MKC is much more than a portal; it’s a collection of all internal knowledge, best practices, and actions that have worked in the past. An MKC embraces best practices in marketing processes, data, analytics, and sophisticated modeling. You can also add enablers (guides, tips, and templates) to assist with marketing tasks. Enablers are tools to implement marketing tasks; they provide metrics to monitor the effectiveness of marketing activity. Because the typical MKC is deployed on a company’s intranet, the data is available to all approved employees 24/7.

Creating an intuitively navigable MKC is the quickest and easiest way to begin your company’s journey toward marketing excellence. It shifts knowledge from the erasable “write and rewrite” memory of an ever-changing human employee base to a permanent, growing, and synergistic corporate memory. Equally important, an MKC is a continuously visible symbol to your marketing personnel, proving that you are serious about giving them the tools to be more effective in their work. It provides a stream of insights on demand that they can tap into whenever they need knowledge to begin, strengthen, or complete an initiative.

An MKC Can Help Solve Problems

Few companies have a comprehensive shared knowledge base for marketing. The need for this capability might lead to small bands of professionals planning to create their own electronic library for their brand, region, or functional area. This narrow approach has several problems: no common standard across the company, no company-approved “best practices,” no procedure for what’s in or out, and no links to similar libraries in other areas.

See if these common conditions apply to your organization:

• Projects move slowly because a common process path does not exist.

• “The wheel” must be reinvented often, and mistakes are repeated frequently because corporate knowledge about what works and what does not has vanished with the relocation or resignation of key employees.

• New initiatives fail or succeed randomly because no proven repeatable development process is captured in an MKC. Different divisions or brands follow different recipes for new-product development.

• Investment dollars generate unreliable returns because what has worked in the past in a similar situation is lost to those who are new to the business.

• Needless searches, meetings, and debates squander human capital.

If your answer is “Sounds like us,” you should consider an MKC.

What Is the Value of an MKC?

An MKC enables everyone in the company to share best thinking and best practices about its brands and business. These become readily available so that employees new to the company or brand can come up the learning curve rapidly regarding all aspects of the business. The MKC is even more important for global companies. Many regions outside the United States do not have good information, research, and metrics. The MKC provides easy access to the programs that have worked in other areas of the organization, and with a common understanding about customers and competitors.

By creating a comprehensive, contemporary MKC, companies can raise the effectiveness levels of their marketing processes and marketing investments. This effectiveness dividend pays out in several ways:

• It increases the likelihood of successful initiatives because marketers maintain a knowledge base of success models.

• It increases speed and agility, including faster time to market, because marketers collaborate around known processes and knowledge.

• It accelerates individual and collective learning, leading to a competitive advantage in speed to market.

Four Types of Marketing Knowledge

Marketers can more effectively implement knowledge management if the systems are developed to distinguish, collect, and disseminate differing types of knowledge (see Figure 11.1):

• Best practices: Processes and how-to tools. They are the least unique to any business and require infrequent updating.

• Historic knowledge: Past marketing and media plans, and creative, promotional, trade, and retail materials. These are somewhat unique to each business and require less-frequent updating.

• Contextual knowledge: Insights about consumers, channels, and competitors. These are unique to each business and require scheduled updating.

• Transactional knowledge: A strategy to tactical linkage with success models such as new-product launches. These are unique and require in-depth information and timely updates.

Figure 11.1. Four types of marketing knowledge.

These knowledge types provide the content areas. The next step is to understand what should be included in each of these areas (the taxonomy) as well as how to build a system that can be easily used by the marketing practitioners.

How to Best Manage Knowledge

A good MKC requires a holistic approach that focuses not only on optimal taxonomy and user interface, but also on the successful user adoption and system refinement to best meet user needs.

An “If you build it, they will come” approach doesn’t work. Senior executives must transform the organizational culture through change management to achieve success. This should be practical and make sense for everyone involved.

We believe these three Rs for the MKC will help guide you:

• Relevant: Information is current for the market, business unit, and brand and is product-specific. The presentation shows a clear understanding of how users prefer to see the information displayed and what they will be looking for. There may be certain times or occasions when more users will be looking for more-specific information (such as annual planning). How will users quickly get to “their stuff”? If a user is seeking something that is specific to a region or market, business unit, brand, or product, don’t make that person sift through everyone else’s stuff.

• Reliable: Users will not tolerate a fishing expedition for information. You should include only what you can reliably deliver so that the user can anticipate what will be there and when. Users will look for content that is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

• Ready: Users should be able to quickly access the data through the use of well-thought-out search-and-filter functionality built into the system. Commit to publishing new content quickly so that users have a reason to keep coming back.

Treat your knowledge center like a product launch. Your users are your customers, so you should both market the MKC and measure its utility. Try to identify a single owner/champion who is responsible and accountable for its success, bolstered by senior management commitment and enthusiasm. The system should evolve to meet new user needs and maintain as open a system as possible. Users prefer that you use standard title structures and abstracts.

The following principles are key to minimizing user frustration and enabling the user to quickly and efficiently find what he or she is seeking:

• Conduct periodic evaluations: These should occur every six months or annually. They track usage (trial and repeat) and help identify priorities for system improvements.

• Set the evaluation’s objectives: Identify usability issues to reduce frustration. Focus on knowledge gaps to be addressed. Understand areas of heavy traffic and activity so that you can build from what is most sought.

Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to gain depth and breadth of usage for a representative group of users. You should also sample both MKC users and nonusers so that you can understand why users visit the MKC and why nonusers do not.

Focus: Gillette Global Marketing Resource Center

The Gillette division of Procter & Gamble developed an advanced MKC in its Global Marketing Resource Center (GMRC). The GMRC has been operational since 2004 and serves about 900 marketing professionals in more than 100 markets. Its objectives are to enable and support knowledge management, capture and transfer best practices and processes across businesses and geographies, provide “just-in-time” training, and significantly enhance marketing effectiveness and efficiency.

Marci Sapers

We asked Marci Sapers, Gillette Vice President for Functional Excellence, to discuss her experience with the GMRC. She provides a candid assessment of the benefits as well as the difficulties of sustaining this effort.

Establish Clear Objectives

Investing scarce corporate resources in an MKC requires a shared commitment to a set of objectives that are sufficiently robust for a credible business case. From the outset, Gillette had very specific objectives for its MKC—the GMRC.

“In 2003 we developed our Global Marketing Resource Center to provide Gillette marketers with global access to business content 24/7 to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. We were looking to enable and support knowledge management, capture and transfer best practices and processes, and support the creation of a marketing culture and community. We believed we would increase productivity by reducing the amount of time people spent looking for existing information and knowledge and would allow our associates to leverage work that already existed.”

Manage the MKC Launch as You Would Any Other Brand Launch

The CEO and top management endorsed the MKC. This facilitated the release of resources and the creation of a financial business case. As soon as funds were available, Marci’s team was able to execute her idea of treating the launch of the MKC as you would the launch of any other brand or business. They used a rigorous approach in which they practiced customer centricity (the customers in this case were the company’s marketers) and established customer needs.

“We built the GMRC using focus groups composed of people from our own marketing staff. We conducted several surveys and looked at what information our marketers used on a daily, monthly, and annual basis to do their jobs. Once the site was completed, we measured our marketing community to understand who went to the site and how much time they spent there. We conducted some quantitative surveys about user satisfaction. Based on these, we continued to enhance the site.

“We introduced the GMRC as a market event and treated this as a product launch. We created a lot of buzz around it, and I think that really helped. We introduced it with a big flash, inviting global marketers to Boston for the launch. We set up an Internet cafe and followed up with marketing material as if it were a new product. We continue to remind people both on how they can use it and the fact that we need them to contribute.”

Observe Behavior Objectively and Be Prepared to Be Flexible in How You Collect and Share Knowledge

The purpose of the MKC is to disseminate knowledge. Therefore, it’s necessary to add and subtract content based on its usage. It’s also necessary to be flexible in data-collection methods, as Marci explains when she talks about the value of sharing knowledge about mistakes.

“As we measure the utility of the knowledge we share, we find, for example, that new-product launches have been the most popular area in the GMRC. Gillette has rolling launches. We do not launch in every market simultaneously, so we put together a launch center that can be used for pre-launch, launch, and post-launch information. Our marketers seem most excited about getting this kind of launch information. The launch promotions center, with toolkits for rolling launches, is very popular, too. Essentially, this knowledge falls under the heading of success models, and marketers are proud to submit them to the GMRC.

“We focused on the most important specific content areas and identified those priorities around key marketing deliverables for the year. For example, when marketing plans were being developed, we would send a specific communication to the knowledge-sharing partners, asking them to submit content related to their plan development and a copy of their final marketing plan. We would send them ongoing communications and take baby steps. For example: ‘This month we are focusing on getting marketing plan information. And by the way, these are the gaps that we had for your group, and this is what we need from your group.’ We develop many of these focused communications and spend a lot of effort to get what we needed.

“Mistakes can also have value. In fact, some pretty senior people have said to our organization that we want to learn from our mistakes, too. Sharing what’s working and what hasn’t worked are both important. It’s a hard area to get people to submit context/concepts showing their mistakes. People often want to bury mistakes. As we built this knowledge center, we asked people to showcase their successes as well as their failures to help our organization avoid repeating failures. I can tell you that we didn’t get a lot of the failures submitted.

“So, to populate our key learning sections—which summarize learnings, including mistakes, related to specific programs—we conduct one-on-one interviews to gain information on both success and failures, and from the interviews, we develop an executive overview. This approach was more successful than simply asking people to submit presentations or even overviews of programs that did not work.”

Maintaining the Knowledge Center Requires an Ongoing Team Effort

Not only does the MKC require a rigorous and creative effort to design and launch, it also requires continuing commitment of resources and energy. Marci describes how she created the virtual team of marketers to submit content and how she maintains the level of enthusiasm.

“Developing knowledge centers is a lot of work; maintaining them also requires a lot of resources. You need to continually add fresh information and visuals to encourage people to come back on a consistent basis.

“There was a lot of management support to set up and maintain the site. We continually reported participation in submitting content as well as usage to senior management. Additionally, we identified a key contact in each work team from around the globe. Each of these ‘knowledge-sharing partners’ (people specifically responsible for evaluating or submitting content within each of the groups) included the submission of content as part of their performance objectives. This was very important, since people had accountability and were rewarded for providing content to update the site. Our ability to maintain the enthusiasm for people to keep on sharing was a challenge. We developed contests and recognition awards to encourage ongoing enthusiasm.

“Honestly, we don’t have the same enthusiasm for document submissions that we had initially. We were on a roll, and we saw from the time we launched it to the time of the acquisition announcement by P&G, each month submissions were increasing.

“We hosted a ‘Marketing Council,’ which met regularly and included about 25 Gillette VPs of Marketing. During our meetings, we always had a ‘showcase on performance’ presentation. By showcasing performance of their groups in number and quality of knowledge submissions versus their peers, we created some incentive for them to motivate their groups to submit documents. We also presented them with site improvements to get their buy-in to our changes, as well as enlist their support to help communicate the updates to their groups.

“We are continuing to evaluate the content and taxonomy of the site and update it on a regular basis. We now have a lot of great documents in the GMRC, and recently selected new knowledge-sharing partners to continue the work of gathering current information.”

Don’t Let Technology Get in the Way of Effective Knowledge Sharing

One of the key elements of the MKC is that it is digital and uses the power of technology. It’s available 24/7, searchable, flexible, easy to add and remove content, and highly expandable in the number of users who can participate. The technology should be tailored to the task; otherwise, it can get in the way as much as it helps.

“We spent a lot of time up front in surveys and questions, getting the taxonomy right. We had an advertising bucket, a media bucket, a marketing planning bucket, and a promotion bucket, with documents in each to support them. However, until people start using the site, you don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Once the taxonomy was established, the technology we used to build the GMRC did not have enough flexibility to change. It took us a long time to get some of the enhancements that we needed based on what documents the users wanted to see, and how they used the site. One of the disappointments was the lack of flexibility in the technology to give some of the capabilities that we would like. It was very difficult and slow to change.

“We used legacy software and systems rather than a new software system identified and designed for what we wanted to achieve. This created ongoing difficulties. I was surprised how long it took us to make changes for a new idea or even to update how we presented some brand information.”

How Do You Measure Success?

Marci’s experience indicates that it’s necessary to be flexible in defining the measures of success, and it takes a willingness to combine quantitative and qualitative measures. When you do so, interesting insights can emerge.

“There are multiple ways to measure success. You can measure success by the number of visitors and visits or by looking at the content and application of the information on the site. In our case, we identified a full range of general and specific measurements objectives, such as what percentage of the marketing population went online and how many times they visited the site. We also tracked content submissions by group and made several qualitative assessments of use and application.

“Honestly, it was hard for us to know how people were really using the site and how it improved their effectiveness and efficiency. However, from the informal feedback of comments and e-mail we received, we learned that the farther away marketers were from our global HQ in Boston, Massachusetts, the more they felt the site was helpful.

“I think measurement of effectiveness is still the million-dollar question: how to measure it? At our peak, 75% of our marketers were utilizing the site. The GMRC was used by a majority of our marketing professionals, or at least they were familiar with it. Almost two-thirds of our marketers visited the site multiple times per month at peak usage.

“So, we can measure who is going there, how long they are spending on the site, even what documents they are reviewing, but in terms of our ultimate goal of increasing efficiency and effectiveness of marketers’ jobs, that is subjective and much harder for us to discern.”

Marci’s Lessons Learned

• Do a lot of preparation up front to understand user needs.

• Spend time not only identifying the knowledge and content that users need, but also designing the taxonomy of how it’s arranged.

• Put the right incentives in place for marketers to contribute content.

• Understand that the new approach to knowledge sharing is a cultural change and, as such, it will take time to get marketers to participate.

• Continued effort is required to maintain both the quality of the knowledge-sharing site and the organization’s enthusiasm for using it.

• Manage a community of knowledge-sharing partners, users, and senior management.

• Measurement is hard, but it repays your effort.