WPP announced the formation of the cross-industry Institute for Real Growth (IRG), a program to help Chief Marketing Officers and other senior business leaders to drive more effective growth strategies.
The not-for-profit, independent Institute, co-founded by WPP with Facebook, Google, Kantar, LinkedIn, the NYU School of Professional Studies (NYUSPS), Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and Spencer Stuart, aims to help organizations focus on sustained, long-term real growth by equipping leaders with best practice approaches to their strategy, structure, capability and leadership.
Participants in the program benefit from a curriculum approved by the IRG Founder Advisory Board and will receive an NYU School of Professional Studies Certificate of Completion in Real Growth Leadership. The program comprises a series of workshops that provide close collaboration with peers, the latest in-depth research, world-class case studies, expert speaker insight and individual coaching, personalized to each attendee’s leadership and organizational business growth needs.
At the first in a series of IRG events, WPP shared new findings from the largest and most comprehensive global study differentiating growth overperformers from underperformers. Speakers at the event in New York included co-founders Carolyn Everson, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook, Bethany Poole, Director of Ads Marketing at Google, Mike Romoff, Head of Global Agency and Channel Sales at LinkedIn, Michael Diamond, Academic Director of Integrated Marketing and Communications at NYUSPS and Greg Welch and Tom Seclow, Consultants at Spencer Stuart.
Over the last year, a team of 20 WPP strategists and consultants interviewed around 500 senior business leaders and evaluated over 1,500 online survey contributions from 73 countries to identify seven building blocks for real growth. The study also incorporated an AI analysis of over 3,500 publications and a behavioural analysis of LinkedIn data from over 800 million connections across 3 million employees.
Key findings from the global growth study revealed that:
- Growth overperformers expand the definition of the market they compete in and offer ever-evolving experiences to their consumers.
- Overperformers embrace a “whole-brained” approach; unlocking the power of data with insights and combining technology with creativity.
- Organizations that are more open and better connected both internally and externally outperform their competitors.
- Organizations that set “humanized-growth” objectives – in terms of value to their customers, their colleagues and their communities – can expect to drive more sustained business growth results.
The Institute for Real Growth’s first event was hosted by WPP in New York. The Institute for Real Growth is run by the same team that led WPP’s Marketing2020 and Insights2020, two industry-wide studies conducted by Kantar that featured in the Harvard Business Review and identify how to organize marketing functions in a digital age, as well as how to use the role of an insights function to help drive customer-centred services.