Prelims

Half Title

The Organic Growth Playbook

Praise for The Organic Growth Playbook

“In The Organic Growth Playbook, Jaworski & Lurie drive marketing back to the place it should never have left: changing actual customer behavior. By focusing on deeply understanding the customer journey in order to deliver compelling behavior change value propositions, the Playbook provides an actionable blueprint for profitably and sustainably growing your business.”

Roger Martin

Co-Author, Playing to Win Strategy Advisor, Author, and Former Rotman School Dean

“Nearly all of the biggest and even best positioned consumer brands around the world are struggling for organic growth. Its clear the tried and true is no longer sufficient. By digging deeper and wider into the context for purchase behavior, Lurie and Jaworski demonstrate an insightful and time tested approach for finding the levers of growth. It works.”

Tom Long

Former CEO

MillerCoors

“Growing one's company is part of every manager's job, from the CEO on down. Most managers know this. They just don't know how to do it. Jaworski and Lurie provide a tried-and-true approach to doubling or tripling a firm's organic growth rate. Any manager committed to growing their company should read it.”

Mark Fuller

Former Chairman and CEO of Monitor Group

“A brilliant, lucid example of how astute observation of practitioners by creative minds can provide workable, powerful, general principles. Absolutely essential reading for any manager concerned with achieving sustained growth in any industry.”

Gerald Zaltman

Harvard Business School and Olson Zaltman, Author of How Customers Think and Unlocked: Keys to Improve Your Thinking

“Bob Lurie and Bernie Jaworski know if a company isn't growing it's probably dying, like most of us. However, in today's world of rapidly changing business models and elusive competitive advantage they offer a fresh map of thinking on how to grow in an unpredictable environment. Read this book.”

Larry Weber

Founder

Weber Shandwick

Title Page

AMA Leadership Series

The Organic Growth Playbook: Activate High-Yield Behaviors to Achieve

Extraordinary Results – Every Time

By

Bernard J. Jaworski

Robert S. Lurie

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

© 2020 Bernard J. Jaworski & Robert S. Lurie. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-83982-687-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-684-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-686-3 (Epub)

Contents

AMA Introduction to Book Series

Welcome to marketing in the twenty-first century – the age of data, social, mobile, automation, and globalization. The field is changing so quickly, it’s difficult to keep up. There is increasing uncertainty about the profession’s mission and responsibilities. Meantime, the demands marketers face are ever more complex and critical.

This is why the American Marketing Association (AMA) has engaged some of the world’s most innovative professionals, academics, and thought leaders to create The Seven Problems of Marketing – a seven-book series that introduces and explores a new set of organizing and actionable principles for the twenty-first-century marketer.

Each book in the series takes a deep dive into one problem, offering expertise, direction, and case studies while striking a balance between theory and application. The goal is to provide a contemporary framework for marketers as they navigate the unique challenges and vast opportunities of today’s dynamic global marketplace.

Here are the seven problems addressed in the series:

• Problem 1: Effectively targeting high-value sources of growth.

• Problem 2: Defining the role of marketing in the firm and C-suite.

• Problem 3: Managing the digital transformation of the modern corporation.

• Problem 4: Generating and using insight to shape marketing practice.

• Problem 5: Dealing with an omni-channel world.

• Problem 6: Competing in dynamic, global markets.

• Problem 7: Balancing incremental and radical innovation.

Importantly, the books in this series are written by and for marketers and marketing scholars. All of the conceptual and analytical frameworks offered are born from practice. The authors have applied their tools and methods in client settings, allowing them to test and refine their ideas in the face of real-world challenges. You’ll read true stories about how marketers have used innovative thinking and practices to overcome seemingly impossible dilemmas and bring about game-changing success. Theories are explored in a way that busy marketers can understand viscerally. Client stories have been incorporated to illustrate how to apply the analysis frames as well as deal with application and practice-based issues.

Our fundamental aim with this series is to hone the practice of marketing for the twenty-first century. The AMA has asserted that there is a critical tension within every enterprise between “best” and “next” practices. Marketers often choose best practices because they are safe and proven. Next practices, which push boundaries and challenge conventions, can be riskier. Few enterprises, however, transform themselves and achieve breakout performance with best practices alone. The next practices discussed in this series are often responsible for driving outperformance. The books in this series are designed to engage you on two levels: individually, by increasing your knowledge and “bench strength,” and organizationally, by improving the application of marketing concepts within your firm. When you finish each book, we are confident you will feel energized and think differently about the field of marketing and its organizing principles. Through the explanation of theory and compelling examples of its application, you will be empowered to help your organization quickly identify and maximize opportunities. After all, the opportunity to innovate and make an impact is what attracted most of us to the field of marketing in the first place.

Russ Klein

CEO, American Marketing Association

Book Series Overview

In 2016, the AMA established its first-ever intellectual agenda. This intellectual agenda focused on complex, challenging, and difficult-to-solve problems that would be of interest to both academics and practitioners. A working team of scholars and practitioners, selected by AMA leadership, identified seven big problems of marketing as the foundation of the agenda. These problems were ranked from a much longer list of challenges. These seven big problems shared three attributes: they were pressing issues that confronted every organization, they were C-suite level in scope, and they could not be solved by one article or book. Indeed, the team felt that each problem could trigger a decade-long research agenda. A key purpose of the AMA intellectual agenda was thus to stimulate research, dialogue, and debate among the entire AMA membership.

The purpose of the AMA book series is to shed a deeper light on each of the seven problems. In particular, the aim of the series is to enable readers to think differently and take action with regard to these big problems. Thus, the book series operates at two levels: individually, increasing your knowledge and bench strength, and at the organization level, improving the application of marketing concepts within your firm.

Given the nature of these problems, no single book or article can fully address the problem. By their very nature these problems are significant, nuanced, and approachable from multiple vantage points. As such, each of the books provides a single perspective on the issue. This single perspective is intended to both advance knowledge and spark debate. While the books may emerge from academic literature and/or managerial application, their fundamental aim is to improve the practice of marketing. Books selected for the series are evaluated on six criteria.

1. Seven Big Problems Focus

   Each book is focused on one of the seven big problems of marketing. These problems identify key conceptual issues in the field of marketing that are the focus of emerging academic research and that practitioners are actively confronting today.

2. Audience

   The book is written primarily for an audience of thoughtful practitioners. Thoughtful in this context means that the practitioner is an active reader of both professional articles and books, is dedicated to enhancing his/her marketing knowledge and skills, and is committed to upgrading the organization’s marketing culture, capabilities, and results. A secondary audience is academics (and students) and consultants.

3. Integrated Framework

   The book provides an integrated framework that frames the problem and offers a detailed approach for addressing it.

4. Field-Based Approach

   The authors have applied their frameworks in client settings. These client settings enable authors to test and refine their frameworks. Conceptual and analysis frameworks are enlivened via practice and case examples that demonstrate application in the field. Named and/or disguised client stories illustrate how to apply the analysis frames, how to deal with application issues, and other practice-based issues.

5. Academic Literature

   The integrative frameworks should be new to the marketplace. The conceptual frameworks should extend existing thinking and the analysis frameworks should provide new ways to conduct marketing-related analysis.

6. Readability

   The book should be intelligible to the average reader. The concepts should be clearly defined and explained, and cases written so that a reader can understand the content on a first read.

On behalf of the AMA, I am excited to bring these books to market. I am anxious to hear your feedback – both positive and challenging – as we move the field forward.

Bernie Jaworski

AMA Book Series Editor

Preface

In the early 1990s, Bob began to notice an odd and disturbing lack of pattern in his work with clients trying to grow or grow faster. They were applying the gold standard methods of marketing: segmenting, targeting, and then positioning products to be differentiated in the minds of desirable customers. But the standard playbook did not reliably result in organic growth. In situation after situation, he observed that well-researched and well-designed campaigns to differentiate products in customers’ minds sometimes produced double-digit growth, but often yielded nothing, and sometimes, confoundingly, led to overall sales declines. On the other hand, he noticed that some clients with “good enough” (but not particularly differentiated) products seemed able to achieve consistent growth. This seemingly random distribution of results left Bob with a puzzle – and a dilemma: should he continue to use the widely accepted standard methods and never be sure he could really help his clients grow, or should he figure out what was going wrong and try something different?

This book is about trying something different – not just for the sake of being different, but in the quest to find a reliable methodology for accelerating organic growth. By the mid- to late-1990s, the core thinking – and the first iteration of the tools – was consistently enabling clients to grow faster. In the early 2000s, Bernie began to teach the tools as he and Bob continued to test and refine them in a wide variety of firms – big and small, in B2B and B2C industries, in developed and emerging economies. They worked. In fact, they worked so well that clients began to embed the new approach into their own processes of planning for growth. Over the past five years, the two of us have worked together to further develop the methodology and articulate its core principles.

The result of those years of effort and experience is captured in this book. Its purpose is simple: to provide a comprehensive, integrated method to consistently accelerate organic growth. As we learned in our journey, this requires both a new approach to marketing as well as some key changes to organization-wide capabilities. While firms can achieve significant value by applying the methodology to an individual product or brand, the benefits are vastly magnified when the whole organization is aligned around the approach.

The key audience for this book is thoughtful practitioners who must struggle to achieve aggressive growth targets each and every year. We therefore provide detailed instructions on how to apply the tools and illustrate the process with four comprehensive client stories of organizations in different industries that successfully implemented the approach. A second audience for this book includes academic researchers and teachers. One of our aims is to challenge the conventional orthodoxy of marketing that differentiating products in the minds of customers is the golden key for unlocking growth. Differentiation is necessary, but it’s not enough. In our view, organic growth cannot be achieved by changing mindsets, but only by changing behaviors. The focus of our approach is, therefore, on finding and influencing the few, key customer behaviors during the purchasing process that disproportionately drive growth.

A note on method. This book is based on trial and error in the field. It emerged from what we learned working side-by-side with clients to accelerate organic growth. We were fortunate in also being able to learn from the experiences of several outstanding colleagues who used these methods with their clients. We’ve had some wonderful successes along the way, some of which are highlighted in this book. We’ve also learned from some failures at the outset that helped us adjust and fine-tune our approach.

All those experiences and the hard work of our many colleagues and clients are reflected in this book.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the entire book and introduces readers to the core concepts and methods of our approach. Chapters 2–10 delve into a detailed explanation of the five principles at the heart of the Playbook approach and includes four end-to-end client stories illustrating the methodology. These chapters lay out the tools and techniques needed to apply the approach in your own business. Chapters 11 and 12 cover some of the lessons learned from applying these tools in different types of firms, industries, and geographies. These two chapters are a must read for those seeking to implement and embed the Playbook principles within their organizations.

We are excited to share these ideas that we have developed, debated, and refined over the course of many years. We hope you enjoy the book and are able to apply its lessons to deliver stronger, more reliable organic growth in your own organizations.

Bernie Jaworski Los Angeles, CA

Bob Lurie Chilmark, MA