Marketing Organisation

 of the Year

Has your organisation maintained its focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience and enabled consistent brand and company growth over the last three years?

Does your organisation anticipate, innovate, and adapt to change?

Does it stand out as a great example of the role that marketing can play in the sustained growth trajectory of a business?

The MAA is proud to launch the 2023 Marketing Organisation of the Year Award – an award that shines a spotlight on that organisation that has clearly demonstrated how their business, brand and marketing strategy is closely aligned and executed to drive sustained returns.

Register to Enter

This Award will recognise the manner in which the organisation meets the needs of its customers, while embracing and developing a marketing mind-set and culture as a business driver. In addition, successfully sustained performance towards a triple bottom line must relate to the successful implementation of marketing initiatives over a period of three years.

To qualify, applicants must demonstrate:

  • The link between the business strategy and the brand and marketing contribution to its success. A successful track record of execution excellence across multiple campaigns and/or brands, as well as evidence of synergistic portfolio management.
  • Evidence of marketing successes across the spectrum of brand planning, consumer insight, communication strategy, innovation, and campaign activation, as well as great use of all elements of the marketing mix across brands and campaigns.
  • Internal excellence in processes and alignment with marketing objectives.
  • Adoption of the best modern marketing practices while rethinking and refining classic approaches.

Simply put, we want to understand your organisation’s alignment to your marketing and brand strategy.

These 5 questions highlight how best to showcase this:

  1. What did you set out to do?
  2. How did you do it?
  3. What were your results and how did you achieve them?
  4. Have you had to adapt and how so?
  5. What lessons have you learnt in the past three years and how are you going to use those learnings in the future?

Please see How Do We Enter for detailed entry instructions. Once you have registered, we will send you a link where you can log in and upload your presentation.

Please prepare your case study as follows, making note of what is required in each section.

Section A: What did you set out to do?

We’re looking for a broad macro view that delivers key insights into your background, thinking, and approach.

Executive Summary

Provide headlines of organisational strategy. We want to understand your marketing philosophy, the key pillars of your strategic approach, and a summary of brand and marketing contribution to growth.

Business, Brand, and Marketing Strategy

Detail your organisation’s brand and marketing strategy here:

  1. How do you approach insight gathering?
  2. What key insights have informed your strategy?
  3. How do you approach and develop your brand architecture and propositions?
  4. How do you approach segmentation and decide which customers to target?
  5. Describe your marketing approach.
  6. Describe your customer experience journey.
  7. How do you approach driving transformation and creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisational culture?
  8. How do you plan for aligning people, embedding the strategy, and tracking the execution to meet your objectives?

Section B: How you did it?

Provide the highlights of how your organisation executed your strategy. Use the 7/8 Ps of the marketing mix to guide your submission, providing no more than three to four key examples that demonstrate excellence in creativity and execution.

Please keep in mind that we are not looking for “marketing campaign of the last few years.” We are looking to see how your strategy came to life and how you speak to these specific Award criteria.

This section should not exceed 50% of the submission, including images and embedded video.

Section C: What were your results?

Did you meet your objectives year on year?  Was there a shortfall?  Did you move the needle and drive your growth agenda? Please share your results from the past three years as they relate to your marketing, brand, and company growth outcomes. Each of these has been elaborated on below.

Remember, we’re looking for key results that can be substantiated.  No vanity metrics, please.
If you wish to link your results, please send an email to: adjudication@marketingawards.co.za and request a list of juror emails to allow access to these files.

Marketing Outcomes:

  1. Marketing ROIs.
  2. Marketing ROOs.
  3. Internal evaluation metrics, such as eNPS scores / engagement surveys / training metrics.
  4. Personal rewards/incentives linked to KPIs.

Brand Outcomes:

  1. External brand health indicators.
  2. Internal brand health indicators.
  3. Brand reputation indicators.

Company Growth Outcomes:

  1. Show company revenue growth relative to competitors (linking to publicly available data where possible).
  2. Show the change in your organisation’s internal social responsibility metrics.
  3. What change can we see in your environmental impact?

 

Section D: Adaptability, sustainability, lessons, and outlook

To complete this section, please answer the questions below.

  1. What are the most significant changes in your operating environment over the past three years? How has your organisation adapted to these changes (including those caused by Covid-19)?
  2. Has the extent to which you’ve had to adapt had an impact on the sustainability and performance of your organisation? In which areas?
  3. What are the most significant challenges/changes in your industry you will need to adapt to in the future?
  4. What lessons have you learned in the last three years as a marketing organisation?
  5. How do these lessons shape your organisational outlook and planning for the future?

Format:

Please submit your entry in .pdf format.  Your submission should be no longer than 9500 words, or 21 pages, including images. The word count/page length used is to prevent overly elaborate entries.

Concise entries that convey a clear understanding of context and strategic intent with robust supporting collateral are encouraged.

Confidentiality:

Please note that all results are strictly confidential, with adjudicators bound by a Non-Disclosure Agreement. When you win the 2023 MAA Marketing Organisation of the Year Award, we will consult with you in creating a case study that provides insights into why you won and the lessons that can be learned from your best practice, in a format that you are happy to publicly share.

Entry fee:

The admin fee for entry is R2720 ex vat

 

 

The Marketing Organisation of the Year will be adjudicated by a diverse panel of highly experienced industry experts.  The selection of judges presiding over this premier category will be determined once all entries have been received, to make sure no conflicts of interest arise.