Andrew Heddle, head of direct-to-consumer commerce at global marketing agency VML, is committed to expanding his professional knowledge and skills. With the goal of fine-tuning his capacity for innovative thinking and marketing, he attended the Strategic Marketing Management program at Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education. In this interview, he describes his experience on campus, some benefits of the program, and how he now uses what he learned to drive his career and his company forward.
For some time, I have had it in mind to attend an executive education program in marketing in order to codify and reason through my everyday work. I wanted to challenge and structure my professional thoughts, and I decided that a short but intensive executive course would be the best format for doing that. I compared a number of strategic marketing courses across the U.S., and ultimately I chose the HBS program because its content, intensity, and duration seemed ideal to me. By committing a solid week to deeply immerse myself in Strategic Marketing Management, I felt that I would be able to leave the cares of my day-to-day career fully behind and dig deep into the content. I had also heard a lot about the case study method and the living group structure, and these facets seemed to perfectly complement my learning style. Furthermore, I felt certain that I would be working with a highly engaged, polished, and mature international cohort who were both capable and motivated. Finally, because of the caliber of the program, my organization was very willing to accommodate my request for time off to attend.
One of the biggest takeaways, which has had enduring value, was learning how to develop a progressive conversation in a group. The case study method requires the faculty to call on numerous members of the group to add value to the ongoing conversation, and at the very outset we were advised to commit to contributing by "making one point, making it well, and moving the conversation forward." This is a magic formula for promoting engagement, developing ideas, and preventing groupthink, and it is immediately applicable in almost any situation. In fact, for me it has become something of a mantra at work and at home. It seems like such a small thing, but the method itself—the immersive reading, thinking, and reasoning we undertook individually, as small groups, and then as a large group—generated enormous energy. The entire faculty doggedly used the progressive conversation structure to teach marketing strategy formation and marketing mix action planning, and over the course of the week these frameworks really embedded themselves. After returning to work, I found the process easy to replicate.
This program reinforced my belief that marketing is the full activity of the company and not simply a department or a set of tactics to be deployed in order to generate revenue. For the companies that I advise, their operations and activities—their understanding of customers, their options, their competitors, and the broader context in which they are operating—revolve around marketing. We studied 15 cases in total, and each brought out different facets of business challenges that were expressed as marketing challenges. I have found this understanding to be genuinely useful for looking at a business holistically. One of the standout case studies focused on the pricing challenge of the 2012 Olympics in London. It was fascinating to see how the values of the Olympic movement and London's staging were expressed through the pricing and attendance policies the organizers adopted. What I learned has encouraged me to look beyond the immediate situation and consider the underlying truth in order to reveal all of a business's options. Today, I find it helpful to recast each scenario as something of a case study, look for the gaps in information we have at hand, and try to interpret the situation through the foundational framework presented.
I really enjoyed the living group experience. At first, it felt daunting to be committed to living in such close quarters with a group of strangers for the better part of a week. But the group worked well together—we were highly engaged and diverse in our viewpoints and background. The campus itself was beautiful and relaxing, and one of the highlights was running the Harvard stadium stairs each morning before breakfast, which was a long-held ambition of mine. The facilities were perfectly organized to ensure that all we had to do was focus on our work and study.
In one word—enduring. This program was the start of an ongoing development experience for me. It required a significant commitment on my part, but it more than repaid the time and effort I devoted to it. During the week I was on campus, I spent just about every waking moment reading case studies, taking notes, and thinking about the various conversations. And after I left campus, I followed through to capture even deeper value. I retained all of my notes and have set about documenting and distilling them into a set of ideas and concepts that I can return to repeatedly over time. This program is not a "course" of study in the generally understood sense of the word. It is not something that one merely completes in order to earn credit. It is an experience that creates a platform for future learning, development, and endeavor.
