Yakult Europe invests in a unified language of marketing

Find out what happened when Yakult brought teams together across their European division to complete MiniMBA in Marketing 

Challenge:  How to refocus marketing as a central driver of growth for the business and synchronise efforts – across borders and departments – by creating a unified language of marketing throughout their European division.

Solution:  Yakult Europe brought together more than 20 employees to undertake MiniMBA together as one company. MiniMBA provides formal training on key topics such as research, strategy, pricing, distribution or product development and teaches highly technical processes that can and do give marketers the ‘right’ answers.

Benefits:  Alignment around a common set of tools, best practices and shared understanding of marketing as a key driver of business goals; the experience has helped propel Yakult Europe forward in a multitude of ways. Yakult continues to actively deploy “MiniMBA thinking” today, with a thriving culture of shared learning at its core.

 

Where it all began

Theo van Uffelen is European Marketing Manager at Yakult. He describes himself as “a big ambassador for looking at marketing as the whole craft,” rather than siloing off different functions to single-minded structures within a wider team, he explains.  

Wanting to refocus marketing as a central driver of growth in the business, Theo led the charge in signing up colleagues across Yakult Europe to do MiniMBA in Marketing together as a team.  

“The key challenge was to get everyone – with all the different languages and different markets and different backgrounds – to the same understanding and language when we talk about marketing,” Theo says. 

By creating a unified language of marketing, Yakult hoped to synchronise growth efforts across borders, as well as across departments. Alongside marketers from each region, participants ranged from Managing Directors to heads of Finance and HR.   

People came together from Germany, UK, Italy, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands; and the result contributed to significant changes in how the company works together across Europe today.  

Moving forward, together

The idea to put people in non-marketing roles through MiniMBA might seem unorthodox but, for Yakult, it has proved invaluable in putting MiniMBA learnings into practice.  

Aligning on “how we see marketing as a key force in contributing to the growth of the organisation,” Theo says, Yakult could “go forward, together.” 

As a company built on scientific innovation, the importance of being market oriented was – at times – being overlooked.  

“One of the immediate benefits was having a much more clear and substantiated view why it’s important to be outside-in thinking (market orientated), instead of inside-out thinking (product orientated),” says Theo, “or at least have a good balance between the two.” 

Crucially, this has enabled more marketers at Yakult to help drive the wider discussions around growth. 

“Writing marketing plans has become easier because we have the same definition and logic. Learning from each other has become a lot easier – not just across the markets but also across the disciplines. 

“It didn’t solve everything overnight. We still have a lot of hard work to do, but MiniMBA creates the foundation upon which you can build further.”  

Treating marketing as a science

“It’s not uncommon for non-marketers – people in finance, HR, production, whoever – to see marketing as the limited area of doing promotions or advertising. 

“We partly have ourselves to blame as marketeers, because we tend to talk about these things most. Whereas the less shiny, less sexy elements of marketing like research, strategy, pricing, distribution or product development don’t get the attention of a new campaign.” 

MiniMBA teaches highly technical processes that can and do give marketers the ‘right’ answers. Van Westendorp’s Pricing Model, Multi-Dimensional Perceptual Mapping and the Jobs-to-be-Done product development framework are just a few of the tools taught throughout ten distinct modules. Tools that demonstrate marketing is not a whim-based secretive art, nor is it the ‘colouring in department.’  

“MiniMBA helped a lot in understanding that we need to listen better to consumers,” says Theo, “and use marketing techniques when we talk about product development, for example. We need to understand how pricing research is important for us to set the long-term strategy in terms of costing and technology development. 

“A number of things have changed in the way that we work that has enabled marketers to make a bigger difference in the company.” 

Synchro-skilling and a culture of shared learning 

MiniMBA is a proven upskilling programme. 94% of marketers who complete the course feel ‘more effective’ as a direct result of MiniMBA in Marketing. This is manifest at Yakult today through more confident, “better marketers,” says Theo. But he also describes a process of synchro-skilling:  

“Yakult is very much a science-based company. We are into having really, really smart brains, who understand microbiology and life sciences, and can explain to other healthcare professionals how the whole gut microbiota works.  

“That means several people who drifted into marketing roles have different backgrounds. Some already had a thorough marketing background, others were people who came in out of the science realm or PR or dietitians, even. 

 “Getting everybody on the same skill level – or synchro-skilling, as I call it – was maybe even more important than increasing individual skill levels. It means the average level is going up and that makes it easier to enable cross departmental and cross market learning.” 

For Yakult, this fertile culture of learning remains a key benefit of completing the course as a company. MiniMBA helped “build a foundation to enable self-learning” that the team actively prioritises today.   

MiniMBA thinking as policy

“Our ambition is still to have new starters join the course as much as possible. Once they have been able to land and get to know the company, we want to expose them to MiniMBA thinking. 

“This is irrespective of their skill level or education. We have people coming in who have a solid marketing education already. We still ask them to do the course, because it’s a good refresher and it’s a good synchroniser.  

“Even people coming in from Yakult Japan, we immediately introduce them into MiniMBA thinking. Not that they are less educated, but they sometimes have a different paradigm or way of looking at things – and this helps us synchronise.” 

Beyond completing the course, Theo highlights the benefits of revisiting the learnings on a regular basis as a team, to truly get the most out of what MiniMBA has to offer. 

“It’s more about the application of knowledge, than the gathering of knowledge per se. I think a pitfall for everyone is being consumed by the daily urgencies and not thinking about how we are applying this in the best way.” 

It’s more about the application of knowledge

A key output of MiniMBA in Marketing is that it helps businesses define and structure their marketing process. From research and planning to objective setting and tracking KPIs, the course delivers an effective set of processes that can be adapted or applied in any marketing environment.  

“When you harvest it right, MiniMBA delivers a lot,” Theo says. “It takes discipline and conscious thought to say, ‘let’s plan a monthly check up.’ Or have that meeting that is not urgent – but important – to assess how are we doing.” 

 The results 

“Measuring impact is difficult to catch in exact numbers,” says Theo, “but you can feel that it’s there in the way we talk about consumer orientation and how we practice marketing.” 

Marketing coordinators have since become marketing managers, which can’t be attributed to MiniMBA training alone, of course, “but I think it definitely helped,” says Theo. 

“For many of the participants, it was not so much about gathering the points to get a promotion, it was more about gathering the knowledge to be a better marketer. 

“We see marketers now being much more confident, whether with their colleagues, people from other departments, or presenting to management, in saying: this is the right way to do it and here’s why.” 

There is the sense that Yakult is moving forward again, Theo explains. “It’s in remarks like, ‘Yakult is now ready for the next phase of growth’ or ‘Yakult is getting ready for the next phase in development and how we work together.’ 

“It’s in these kinds of remarks that there is tangible proof of Yakult investing in its people, investing in one language across all markets, and investing in creating the foundation for new growth and new thinking.” 

there is tangible proof of Yakult investing in its people, investing in one language across all markets, and investing in creating the foundation for new growth and new thinking

 

A final unexpected benefit, Theo tells us, is the bonds that have formed through the experience of studying together for MiniMBA.    

“People have become really good friends,” he says. “We had the marketing managers of Germany and Austria and one science-side person from my team working together for the exam – and that created a bond that is still there. 

“It was nice to see people understanding the value of complementarity and using that. In teams, sometimes you see people who are different bumping into each other. But now at Yakult we say, ‘Hey, you’re different! That’s good. Let’s work together.’ Because in a complementary relationship, we are much stronger than in a competing relationship.” 

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