Marketing Governance

Chief marketing officers and other senior marketing leaders now recognize that agility has become a critical attribute of successful marketing. Several factors are driving the need for more marketing agility. The proliferation of digital communications channels greatly increases the number of ways that consumers and business buyers can connect with brands and one another. Technology has also changed how potential buyers access information about the products or services they may be interested in purchasing. Perhaps most importantly, buyers’ values and preferences are changing more rapidly than ever.

The growing importance of marketing agility is demonstrated by the attention it is receiving from professional organizations, consulting firms, and marketing solution providers. For example, the Marketing Agility Assessment service as part of its marketing communication automation solution. Read More

PepsiCo, the food and beverage group, has achieved greater coordination in its global advertising creative and production activities, yielding cost benefits and more consistent messaging. In a bid to rejuvenate flagging performance levels, the firm is currently focusing on five strategic areas, including technical issues like execution, productivity and enhancing cash returns, as well as innovation and brand building.

While discussing the last of these matters, stated it was on target to spend 5.7% of revenues on ads and marketing (A&M) this year, an uptick from 5.2% in 2011. Indra Nooyi, PepsiCos CEO, said:

Weve made good progress on increasing our A&M investment and weve significantly stepped up our media in key markets. Much of this is enabled by having much greater coordination among our operations globally, allowing us to leverage creative and production activities across multiple geographies, which gives us cost leverage and drives greater consistency in our brand messaging. Read More

For over sixty years, the IKEA catalog has been a permanent feature. 198 million copies are distributed in 27 languages all around the world. While most companies are ditching their paper catalog in favor of showcasing their products online, the Swedish furniture manufacturer has decided to update their trusted publication and bring it to life.

Meet the IKEA catalog 2.0. Using a smartphone or tablet, you can view enhanced content interactively. It looks pretty slick. And it suits the IKEA philosophy of being cost-effective and innovative. The only thing un-IKEA about it is that it doesnt come in flat packages. .

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Eloqua makes it easy to see how marketing drives revenue so you can make better decisions about where to spend resources.

In the eyes of many management teams, marketing is still an art instead of a a science. The need to prove the contribution of Marketing towards company revenue is evident and urgent. Getting the right statistics and financial data is key to proving the worth of Marketing to any organization. The Revenue Performance Management solution by software vendorEloqua helps with this. It offers a variety of dashboards, data, and metrics. Almost anything to do with Marketing and Sales can be measured and analyzed, it seems: data on the cost per response, lead and opportunity. The reports are interactive and can be easily shared so everyone can see where investments need to be made.

Knowledge really is power, according to Eloqua. This solution might just put the power in the hands of marketers. .

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The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) reveals.

Insights from 100 senior marketing and brand leaders across international organizations form the basis of the Branded Customer Experience Benchmark, which reports that only 13% of brand owners believe their company excels at delivering a day-to-day customer experience suggesting a gap between brand promise and customer reality.

This is despite seven out of ten marketers questioned rating investments in customer experience as more effective than those of marketing communications when building brands and driving marketing and customer performance. Read More

Marketing leaders in large organizations are facing an array of formidable challenges. One of the most difficult is the need to develop and execute relevant, customized, multi-channel marketing programs on an accelerated basis. The reality is, marketing today needs to move at Internet (or even Twitter) speed.

To keep up with today’s rapidly changing marketing environment, one key is to reduce the cycle time required to create and deliver marketing programs. Short cycle times enable marketers to be more responsive to competitive conditions and deliver fresh marketing content on a frequent basis. Short cycle times also indicate that a company is using streamlined and automated marketing processes, which usually means greater marketing efficiency and effectiveness. Read More

Marketers who have come to be perceived as value generators for their organization have learned how to use data, analytics, processes and metrics to move business results and demonstrate their contribution. The problem is that many marketers are tracking metrics that are easy and convenient but have little or nothing to do with the organization’s performance. The real challenge for a good number of marketers is to develop and use metrics that drive results.

ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing have teamed up in an Marketing Performance Mangement survey (open until July 27th) to give marketers the opportunity to gain insight in their use of marketing data, metrics, and analytics to inform marketing decisions, predict buyer behavior, improve marketing performance, and forecast trends.  Read More

The Robot is involved. .

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Another MRM case study this week, this time of a collaboration between Brazilian software vendor Arizona and the Brazilian division of Spanish bank Arizona. The marketing team name a few features that switching to an MRM solution has brought them: easily sharing and sending files to and from agencies, budget management, and planning tools.

Whats interesting is that they approached the MRM project very thoroughly. Starting at the bottom of the organization, at the production level, the implementation of MRM software is working its way up via management to analysis. This division of is actually quite similar to MRMLOGIQs Ten Functional Areas model. The integrated approach makes all marketing-related information visible quickly and easily, which allows marketers to justify their expenses and become fully accountable. . .

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Fournaise Marketing Group survey released in July 2012. A similar proportion think marketers misunderstand the real meaning of the words results, ROI and performance. The upshot of this is that 8 in 10 CEOs believe marketers are disconnected from companies’ financial realities, and as a result, the same proportion claim they do not trust and are not very impressed by the work done by marketers.

CEOs’ concerns regarding marketers’ focus on ROI finds some basis in marketers’ own perceptions. According to a March 2012 report from Columbia University and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA), 57% of senior marketers say they don’t base their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis. In fact, roughly two-thirds report establishing their marketing budgets in part on historical spending, and 28% on gut instincts. And when looking at specific spending decisions, 21% say they use financial metrics for little or none of the decisions, while 7% are making most or all of the decisions absent any metrics at all. Read More