The consumer goods industry has long operated on the assumption that if you hire enough clever people and give them enough money, good advertising will eventually result. Reckitt, the British conglomerate behind Lysol, Finish and Dettol, appears to have decided that hope is not a strategy.

The company has built what it calls the Reckitt Marketing Academy, a global training operation responsible for upskilling 1,400 marketers across 200 countries. Veronika Kryuchkova, the global head of capability building for the academy, describes its mission in terms that sound almost actuarial: to create "predictable performance for brand builders."

The academy launched in late 2020, during the pandemic-driven surge in demand for hygiene products. Rather than simply accepting the windfall, Reckitt conducted an internal assessment and discovered, in Ms. Kryuchkova's words, that "we were lagging behind our peers" in marketing capability. (Organic growth, it seems, had been doing some flattering work.)

The program that emerged relies on a network of senior facilitators and regional "capability champions" — a structure Ms. Kryuchkova calls "freedom in a framework." In practice, this meant deploying a brand-building curriculum face-to-face to more than 800 marketers across 26 countries in six months.

Measuring return on such an investment is, as she acknowledges, genuinely difficult. But there are reference points. A team in the United Kingdom applied lessons from a digital marketing boot camp to build a Dettol campaign that secured a premium broadcast slot typically reserved for the annual John Lewis Christmas advertisement — and won a Kantar award for its trouble.

On the matter of artificial intelligence, Ms. Kryuchkova offers a formulation that may disappoint those hoping for revolution: "Technology augments fundamentals. It does not replace them. If the fundamentals are broken, AI will just accelerate the wrong things."

Her advice to young marketers is to treat capability-building the way Warren Buffett treats capital — compounding investments over time rather than collecting credentials. It is the sort of counsel that sounds obvious until you consider how rarely it is followed.

Original story published in The Drum: "How Reckitt is training 1,400 marketers to deliver consistent growth | The Drum"