Competency Assessment & Competency Management Given The Top Priority
Things that prove you being competent enough are listed as follows:
An insightful description of the target customer groups and segments
Backed up by qualitative and quantitative marketing research
Knows the difference between attributes, benefits and values
The brand’s promise
The brand’s tagline
Familiarity with self-expressive brand benefits
Importance of category description
Understands the following qualitative research techniques: projective, laddering and guided imagery
The brand’s media plan is highly targeted and efficient based on the target customer definition
Is familiar with the concept of customer touch point design
The CEO is involved in the brand strategy process
Good understanding of customer purchase and usage behaviors
Customer-centric, common sense approach to all marketing decisions
Administrative portfolios, similar to those used by instructors, also provide evidence of administrative competence. Administrators can decide on the materials and artifacts to include in their portfolios. If the focus is on instructional leadership competencies, the portfolio may contain minutes of staff meetings, procedures implemented to assess instructor accountability, and examples of research articles disseminated to staff on such topics as adult learning and development and the use of technology for instruction
Testing Marketing Competence
Marketers possess various abilities, but often fail to distinguish among the qualities they possess. Analysis of the following can somewhat help:
What "reach" and "frequency" does this marketing campaign deliver?
Explain your pricing strategy and why you think it is or isn't working?
Which lead sources are delivering the highest ROI? What is the ROI?
What is your media spend level versus that of your competitors?
What is your brand's brand development index (BDI) in a particular market?
Does your brand have an "elevator speech"? What is it? Is it compelling?
Assessing the competence of your favorite marketing "expert"
The lowest level of marketing competence is “unconscious incompetence.” You don’t know what you are doing, and worse, you don’t know that you don’t know.
The next stage up the ladder is “conscious incompetence.” You’ve recognized that the reason your marketing isn’t working is that you don’t know what you’re doing.
Moving higher up the ladder of marketing competence, you reach the stage of “conscious competence.” You’ve read the books, taken the courses, and understand what works. But your experience at putting it into practice is limited. An auto company today may need maintenance and service engineers who, in addition to being mechanical engineers, also have an understanding of electronics and electrical engineering. In such situations, an audit of competencies possessed by company executives helps the HR department to take decisions for re-deployment and retraining of employees according to business needs
Do this enough times, and you will slowly begin to become a true master of marketing. You will reach the highest level of marketing competence, “unconscious competence.”
Well “competency profiles” are job specific and join those sets of
competencies needed to do the job with the performance needed to deliver
the results.
There may be between 6 and 10 job specific competencies within a marketing
competency profile. To illustrate the point, conceptual marketing planning & project management models such as the Pharma Impact Marketing process below are often used in companies as the foundation of marketing thinking. This concept, like others, is based on the rationale that at the core of every Pharma brand to be marketed is a rational and emotional offering, or the business core, which is the crystallization of our marketing thinking, planning and audit process. Competencies are a combination of several entities motives, traits, self-concepts, attitudes or values, skills and abilities all of which can differentiate superior performers from average performers. Since competencies take a composite view of an employee’s ability to perform, they go beyond mere job knowledge. This becomes particularly useful when the definition of jobs itself changes under external competitive pressures. Consider the case of the automobile sector in India. In order to survive, Indian vehicle manufacturers have had to up-grade products by replacing manually operated product features with electronically controlled ones. An impact of this product change has been a change in job specifications.