JANUARY 2014 / NO. 2
TAGS: RIGHT-TO-PLAY, RIGHT-TO-COMPETE, RIGHT-TO-WIN, BOOZ & CO, KORN FERRY, ASSOCIATION OF NATIONAL ADVERTISERS, INTELLIGENCE CONTINUUM

Right-to-Play, Right-to-Compete or Right-to-Win Capabilities

“Assess opponents’ conditions, observe what they do, and you can find out their plans and measures”, Meng Shi
The above statement is straightforward and the marketers in your organizations should have the answers! Customers can make a purchase anytime, anywhere. Marketing is asked to do more to drive growth, with the same or fewer resources, while their spending is increasingly subjected to a new level of scrutiny. Most marketers try to tackle these challenges by spreading their bets across a variety of activities, a multipronged approach that leads to the incoherent use of funding, talent and other resources. Marketing organizations need to be strategic when it comes to managing their resources and teams. According to research conducted by Booz & Company, Korn Ferry and the Association of National Advertisers, two key priorities of action are relevant:
  1. Marketing leaders need to narrow their focus, identifying ways to support the few differentiated capabilities that their company as a whole should pursue, to establish a right-to-win, meaning, the ability to engage in any competitive market with a better-than-even chance of success in the markets in which they compete
  2. Marketing needs to hire and retain the talent that will support their role in developing these company capabilities
The big challenge is to invest more wisely in capabilities, whereby three separate classes have been identified. The first is to have the right-to-play capabilities, the basic functional capabilities such as campaign management, media buying and budgeting. The second is to have the right-to-compete capabilities, namely the capabilities to compete effectively within the sector of industry such as customer relationship management, format optimization (in retailing) and brand management. And the third is to have the right-to-win capabilities, which are cross-functional, complex, and reinforce one another, and are directly linked to the company’s fundamental strategy of its ‘way to play in the market’ and so are relevant to all of its products and services. This coherent alignment between all the critical capabilities, the market and the portfolio, differentiate a company from its future competitors.
The Intelligence Continuum with the four different levels of intelligence contributes to these ‘right-to-win capabilities’ of organizations and concerns marketing intelligence (1), market intelligence (2), competitive intelligence (3), and strategic intelligence (4).
“Strategic intelligence starts with the executive at the top”
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