Growing a sustainable competitive advantage

A significant part of what makes your business unique is its capabilities. They define what your customer’s value and distinguish you from your competitive set. If you offer something unique, your customers will choose you over your competitive location.

A capability framework is an essential tool for a high-performing company:

• It sets the tone and a common language for describing critical attributes of a function
• It allows you to focus your efforts on the areas that matter to your customers
• It is part of creating a sustainable competitive advantage
• It allows you to identify critical areas and create a plan to develop expertise in them.

 A team’s effectiveness grows when they understand the criteria they perform and where the overall team and support structure needs to be enhanced.

Creating a set of capabilities

Creating capability frameworks in Shopper Marketing, Category Development and Trade Marketing should be pragmatic and practical. Frameworks should take a holistic view of the organisation’s needs, resources, and desired future state.

Where there is no existing framework, we will create one that includes technical and professional know-how, personal competencies and behavioural skills. If there is a current model, it will be reviewed, refined and improved. The outcome is the same whichever route is followed – a robust framework.

The framework will comprise a diagnostic tool that identifies the critical area of expertise, supporting evidential statements for three levels – good, better, and best. It will include a place where the evidence seen endorses the findings and incorporate a summary sheet with a visual representation of those findings.

Assessing organisation capabilities

An assessment of the team and a broader set of internal clients shines a light on the materials currently in use/being produced and assess any available tools, data and software provision and practices. The framework is populated, and a suggested good to great roadmap will be created.

Next, the roadmap and findings will be presented to the client team, and workshops will be run to share the results and roadmap. A specific plan is created to identify actions, owner, timescale and dependencies.

The outcome

An identified set of capabilities and a roadmap for improvement have clear benefits and are a way to grow business performance and create a high-performing department.