Finding a quick fix

The short answer to the question “how much do marketing courses incorporate insights from non-marketing sources?” is… “not a lot”.

Examine the contents of any of the courses provided by the Institute of Sales Promotion, the Institute of Direct Marketing or Institute of Practitioners in Advertising – which are all highly regarded – and the overwhelming impression is that these are courses designed to provide students with the tools of the trade.

In the words of Chris Bestley, education consultant for the ISP: “The ISP and IDM courses teach you how to do the business. They teach you about the nitty-gritty of direct marketing and promotional marketing.”

The organisations have responded to this by trying to steer the courses away from the straight and narrow. But each time they do, it ends badly.

Jill Hancock, director of professional short courses at the IDM, says that during the past couple of years the organisation has attempted to provide a course on central finance, but uptake has been poor.

Bestley says that a few years ago he asked members if they would be interested in training around the areas of people management and presentation skills. “The response was positive so I put a package together, but got no response,” he says.

Last-minute hitch

Part of the problem is the nature of the business. Agency staff are notorious for signing up to training courses and then dropping out at the last minute. An urgent pitch is always going to take priority.

But at the IDM, as Hancock points out, about 70 per cent of the its membership base is clients. “People don’t have the time or budgets for training. If they discover there is a gap in their knowledge on a subject, only then will they do something about it.”

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a classic example. We run very successful courses on the basics of CRM. When we tried to develop a second stage which looked at how you get return on your CRM, people were not interested.”

But if the contents of the marketing courses are not changing, the way the courses are being run is. The IDM and ISP are increasingly providing bespoke, in-house training for their members. And agencies are looking at how they can continue to provide professional development for their staff without them leaving the office for too long.

Tish Mousell is head of account management training and development at Publicis. For the past three years she has been running “Power Hours”, which take place in the agency on alternative Monday lunchtimes.

According to Mousell, one of the main reasons for developing the Power Hours was because of the reputation that agency staff have for cancelling training commitments at the last minute.

Cometh the hour

The Power Hours are delivered largely by senior agency staff who are expected to provide a high-level, interactive presentation about what they or their department does and how. They are also open to outside trainers and presenters as long as no one uses the time to sell their services to the agency.

But despite the innovative presentation style, the content of the Power Hours is still largely about agency business and how it is done.

The only significant departure in training that has emerged in the advertising and marketing sector recently has nothing to do with the trade at all, but much more to do with personal development.

Peter Law, director of coaching at business consultants Change-Agency, says: “There is a new generation of managers who are waking up to the fact that people want a work/life balance. People are as motivated as they were before and still most of our lives are spent at work. But we can only get what we need from people if they are happy in their environment.”

Part of what the Change-Agency does is coach people in how to deal with stress, how to be appropriately assertive around clients and colleagues, how to deal with challenging people as well as provide training in anger management.

Law believes this type of coaching is particularly useful in agency environments “which are full of creative energy, but provide little time for people to deal with the emotional baggage that comes with it.”

Coaching is becoming so popular in this sector that the Coaching Academy, which trains people in personal and professional coaching, will be running a specific course this year aimed at marketing.

Taking it personally

The IDM has also launched a coaching and mentoring service for its members. Company director Fidelma Haverty admits that “personal development has been neglected” and that the coaching and mentoring service is being taken up by agencies which are concerned about the development of their staff.

The number of organisations providing this type of training is growing as more senior personnel buy into the advantages of the training.

Sheppard Moscow has been doing this for 20 years and provides a programme – Positive Power and Influence – which focuses on increasing personal awareness and the impact one has on others in the office. The week-long residential course looks at how to influence colleagues using personal, rather than positional, power.

Alison Seaver, marketing manager at Irish Life Corporate Business, recently went on the Sheppard Moscow course. She says: “The main area the course covered is your interaction with others. What is analysed is the intention of your behaviour versus the actual impact.”

Seaver says that this kind of coaching is crucial for marketers “who have to come up with campaigns and then persuade management or sales to buy into them.”

There is no doubt that the marketing sector is committed to training, and the courses provided by the IDM, ISP and IPA are considered to be some of the best. But there is little evidence of practitioners really being encouraged to learn about the world outside marketing. The increase in personal and professional coaching will improve working practices, but this still does not increase a person’s knowledge base outside of their own sector.

It is perhaps unreasonable to expect such a high-octane sector, particularly when it comes to ad agencies, to find the time to do much more than specific practitioner training. The truth is, this sector gets the training it wants because that is what it believes it needs.