The control you have of your brand is based on how well you listen. Marketing’s job needs to be more than just getting the message out. It is equally important to get the message in. Action Learning is what I might call my standard work. It should be baked into your marketing processes.
Action Learning Steps:
1. Situation/Assess
2. Frame/Ask
3. Explore/Acquire
4. Reframe/Appraise
5. Action/Apply
I might argue that you do not own your brand. It is determined by what the outside world experiences. If you build a sales and marketing learning process you can help construct your brand. Without it, your brand is left on its own. A perilous journey to say the least.
In a Strength-Based Marketing Framework, I use the concept of Action Learning in a similar way that in the Lean World uses the concept of Standard Work. It is the way we go about our work. The AL concept by Rodney Podesta is as close to my thinking of this practice that I have seen. When you look at Sales and Marketing folks they need to have a model that keeps them at the edge or as Podesta depicts abstract and divergent. It is where we find new prospects and opportunities.
People use their surroundings, current trends, and competitors to formulate their opinion about our product and service. Many new product launches fail as a result of just not understanding the current situation. They fail to connect all those features, benefits, outcomes to prior customer experiences. We have understood in education that new learning is built on prior knowledge. People use that knowledge to construct meaning. It is the same in sales and marketing. We need to first connect our product/service to the current customer’s situation. I like to think of Inquiry as that first step.
I have been looking at different assessment tools and the idea of the GRASPS model keeps re-surfacing. It is somewhat dated as I first ran across this over a decade ago in the work of McTighe & Wiggins and the Understanding by Design series for education which has been around probably for 20-years. This adaption is sort of unique as the verbiage is mostly taken from Stem statements. Who would have thought education was a part of sales and marketing?
