Lea Farstveet
Director, Marketing
Pfizer Inc.
Embedding a Digital Culture
Nearly 90% of respondents to a 2017 global survey of managers and executives conducted by Deloitte believe their company is facing disruptive change driven by digital technologies and 70% say their organization does not have the skills to adapt. Lea Farstveet has made it her mission to ensure that is not the case at Pfizer.
In 2013, Lea designed “Digital Chops” as an onboarding resource for new marketers. Since then, the program has become a comprehensive internal training program, with five components, including: Live Training, eNewsletters, Website, Digital Brain Trust, and Case Studies. Digital Chops content is used to arm U.S. marketers with the resources and opportunities needed to develop themselves in a digital environment
Participation is always optional; however, the program has reached nearly all marketers and key cross-functional colleagues over 12,000 times. This represents a significant growth since the program’s inception in 2013, when the target audience was only 25 marketers. In fact, so far, there have been 2,309 total live training attendees with 828 unique attendees across disciplines. And the average for live training sessions in 2017 represented more than a 300% increase from 2014.
The Digital Chops training acts as an invitation to augment the practical, hands-on learning marketers utilize in their day-to-day roles. The live trainings are facilitated by Lea and take into consideration marketers’ interest and digital IQ. The series varies in topics, but some examples from this past year ranged from social media to understanding the customer journey. The program leverages internal and external subject matter experts but the primary value, and the most highly ranked element from surveys, is incorporating presentations and case studies from the marketers themselves—providing real-world examples.
As a result, social media competency at Pfizer has grown over the past few years following a concerted training effort from Digital Chops. In addition, the push for an enhanced digital experience has resulted in the upsurge of innovative and improved customer tools on social platforms, which were industry firsts for both Pfizer and the platforms.
