Building globally brilliant marketing capability

The story

The way people eat, cook and shop has changed dramatically. The digital age has disrupted the path to purchase and introduced competition from brands big and small.

Barilla recognised they needed to reinvent their relationship with consumers to keep pace with their changing needs or lose relevance and market share.

We helped shift the mindset of their marketing organisation and introduced a consistent method enabling Barilla to make a radical shift towards the consumer.

The Challenge

Disruption in the way people eat, cook and shop make it difficult for global CPG brands to move quickly enough to respond to changing consumer needs. Challenger brands offer new experiences, artisanal quality and convenience. Amazon, Google and Facebook are investing and transforming the FMCG industry across the customer decision journey. Consumer behaviours and market trends are changing fast.

It’s difficult for heritage CPG giants like Barilla to adapt to new trends and business models. Failure to keep up with the pace of change is threatening market share and reputation.

What we did

We created The Digital Imperative – a marketing capability programme that is helping Barilla make a radical shift towards the consumer.

We designed and delivered The Digital Imperative on-location around the world for the Barilla global marketing community, repositioning their entire approach to digital and to marketing.

It is a people movement. We equip the marketing community with the mindset and tools to reinvent marketing. This empowers them to create ground-level change.

The programme consists of a series of learning weeks in which participants put digital methods into practice with a live product challenge. We show attendees how to:

• Build personas using consumer data, and bring them to life with consumer journey mapping
• Build creative campaigns as a response to consumer needs
• Set actionable KPIs with an objective of learning from performance, course correcting and identifying new opportunities.

This active learning is reinforced with individual transformation commitments from each participant.

The Results

Our digital capability programme has reset expectations for marketing excellence at Barilla and established a growing people movement to transform marketing.

We have established a consistent method for consumer data-led planning, execution and measurement.

The Digital Imperative is a framework for continual improvement: a common language and method for innovation, learning and development.

86% of participants feel there is now a common language for digital marketing at Barilla, increased from 4%.

95% of participants are confident that they can apply a digital mindset to their work

90% say that learnings from the week will change their approach to content

86% report that their new knowledge will have a tangible impact on their work in the coming weeks and months

We are delivering a game-changing capability programme to transform the way the organisation thinks about, plans and measures marketing. Our programme is shifting Barilla from traditional to modern marketing.