By Erika FlynnPortland, ore. — The nine-member team that leads Intel Corp.’s shopper marketing efforts, along with one strategic member of the tech-nology giant’s internal marketing and research group and two representatives from agency partner Arc Worldwide, were hard at work in May earning the Path to Purchase Leadership University’s “P2P Practitioner” and “P2P Profes-sional” industry designations.

Renee Novello, global retail marketing man-ager and director of shopper marketing at Intel, spearheaded the effort to have her team com-plete all the necessary coursework under an accelerated learning schedule.

“We’ll be more successful as a team if we’re intact, using the same language, the same beliefs, and reading the same song sheets,” she says. “The shopper marketing vision and discipline should be something we all believe in equally. Any one of us should be able to explain the vision and the importance of the discipline that the global marketing team looks to follow.

“We prioritized this as a very important step in creating the discipline within our organization.”

Novello hopes that making shopper market-ing more strategic will influence Intel’s other Centers of Excellence.

Path to Purchase Leadership University (P2P-LU), launched in 2015, is the advanced learning division of the Path to Purchase Institute. It introduced the Industry Designation program in 2016 to help learners be recognized for their efforts. Individuals who complete the required courses and pass corresponding exams and as-sessment exercises can earn designations as “P2P Practitioner,” “P2P Professional” and, ultimately, “P2P Master.”

Members of the Intel team worked toward achieving “Practitioner” status after completing two e-learning courses on the P2PLU portal, Shopper Marketing (SM 300) and Shopper Be-havior & Engagement (SM 301).

The group then convened in May at the In-tel campus in Portland to complete the sec-ond level of coursework through live training conducted by P2PLU facilitators. After under-taking three courses — Shopper Insights (SM 302), Understanding Retailers (SM 323) and Advanced Strategic Shopper Collaboration (SM 400) — over two days, the learners were eligible for the “Professional” designation.

Earning these designations requires indi-viduals to apply the learning from the courses to a series of exercises and activities designed to illustrate an advanced level of thinking about the path to purchase, says Patrick Fitzmaurice, managing director of professional development at the Institute.

Novello says the thought leadership her team earned through the coursework will bring tre-mendous value going forward. “We strongly believe in the store-back mentality, and it’s very important for the people we’re influencing to feel like they’re getting the shopper marketing strategy from people who have dedicated time to thinking about all of this, as well as about how the discipline is relevant for Intel and how we can go to market.

“We have to influence some of that change in behavior, so if all 10 of us need to evangelize shopper marketing, I want them to have the ‘stripes’ of the program, if you will.”

Novello says the team was on board from the start and made a serious commitment to earn-ing the designations. “We want to be experts

on the topic,” she says. Intel has been “thinking and living” shopper

marketing for the past five years, Novello says, so the first level of designation provided an im-portant review of many topics within the space while offering useful new insights.

It was imperative that the second level of courses be live instruction, she says, so there could be more dialogue about the unique rel-evance for Intel. “The face-to-face relevance with this second level is that [the instructors] are learning a little more about my business and my challenges and we’re really able to take the lessons and make it relevant for the team. It’s very important that this training be action-able for us.”

The timing of the training affords her team the opportunity to make changes to its plan-ning process. “As we start thinking about next year, if we feel like there’s a gap based on what we learned, we have time to fix it and influence our 2017 strategy.

“My staff is pretty stoked about it, honestly. It brought in some new energy.” SM

Intel Team Commits to Earning P2PLU Designations

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