Unveiling the Path to Sustained Business Growth

In early January 2024, the Institute for Real Growth released their new study conducted in partnership with Oxford Saïd Business School focusing on driving sustained value creation for all stakeholders.

The IRG Impact Study focuses on stakeholder groups defined as Colleagues, Customers, Community and Capital Markets. The Marketing Society is one of the key IRG Impact Study Partners and member Kate Mackie attended the launch event and shares her takeaways below.

The study is one of the first of its kind covering cross-industry B2B and B2C businesses with 5 functional deep dives (CEO, CFO, CCO, CMO, CHRO) and 8 country deep dives (US, UK, NL, Turkey, China, India, France and Australia).

The study looked at those businesses that underperformed vs. those that overperformed (contrasting quantitative online survey scores of revenue growth and stakeholder value creation). The headline findings are:

• The IRG Impact Study data shows that 90% of leaders at overperforming companies approach stakeholder value creation as a business growth opportunity in contrast to only 50% of leaders at underperforming businesses.
• The Study identifies 5 key drivers that together provide a tangible framework for you to step through to build your own strategy:

1. Ground: The foundations are set by mapping out all stakeholders for your business, understanding your impact on them and planning to maintain engagement with them - backed up by the finding that 61% of overperformers represent stakeholders in decision making.
2. Reimagine: Prioritise long-term thinking and future back planning. Where do you want to be and what is your company purpose?
3. Focus: Embrace complexity by building your long-term plan aligned to your reimagined future that you can then use as a filter for your short-term decision making.
4. Organize: Collaborate better across internal and external siloes. Ecosystem thinking enables greater value for all. At EY our latest 2023 research in this space shows that high-performing ecosystems deliver 1.5x more revenue than low-performers.
5. Unleash: Role model Da Vinci leadership across the board – combine right and left brain thinking with empathy, whilst promoting an open and results-driven culture.

This is a topic that we at EY have been interested in for some time. We were integral to the development of the Long-term value framework back in 2019 and have been a purpose driven organization since 2017, and in the same timeframe have more than doubled our revenues, showing the commercial power of a value led strategy.

Taking the next step and building a strategy that drives inclusive not exclusive growth begins with getting into the detail of the study.  As Marketeers we are in a unique position to commercialize humanized growth, reimagining your own purpose-led future whilst focussing on driving long term value for all stakeholders.

Read the study here.

Written By Kate Mackie, Global Integrated GTM Lead | Partner at EY

Published on 24 January 2024