WPP Co-Founds 'Institute for Real Growth'

Marcoms giant WPP has announced the formation of a not-for-profit, cross-industry organization called the Institute for Real Growth (IRG), to help Chief Marketing Officers and other senior business leaders drive more effective growth strategies.

Co-founded by WPP, Kantar, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, the NYU School of Professional Studies, Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and Spencer Stuart, the new institute aims to help organizations focus on sustained, long-term 'real growth' by equipping leaders with best practice approaches to their strategy, structure, capability and leadership. Its program comprises a series of workshops that provide close collaboration with peers, in-depth research, case studies, speaker insight and individual coaching, personalized to each attendee's leadership and organizational business growth needs.

IRG is run by the same team that led WPP's Marketing2020 and Insights2020 industry-wide studies conducted by Kantar, designed to identify how to organize marketing functions in a digital age, as well as how to use the role of an insights function to help drive customer-centred services. Over the last year, a team of twenty WPP strategists and consultants interviewed around 500 senior business leaders and evaluated over 1,500 online survey contributions from 73 countries to identify seven building blocks for real growth. The study also incorporated an AI analysis of over 3,500 publications and a behavioural analysis of LinkedIn data from over 800 million connections across three million employees.

Marc de Swaan Arons (pictured), co-founder of the IRG and Kantar Consulting CMO, comments: 'Together with my co-founder Frank van den Driest (Kantar Consulting Chief Solutions Officer), we have expanded on WPP's global growth study to create an industry-wide program that is focused on helping senior leaders make better marketing decisions and influence better business decisions. IRG is the only platform where growth leaders can learn from world-class 'overperformers' and topic experts and collaborate with peers to solve their specific business growth challenges.'

Web sites: www.wpp.com and www.instituteforrealgrowth.com .