I rarely talk to anyone at my bank (I can do it all on the internet) but I noticed something wrong with a statement recently and realised I'd actually need to talk to a human at the bank to sort it out. After 5 minutes of searching their website I finally found the number to call and then had the increasingly-excruciating IVR experience to get through to a customer service rep.
I'm definitely not the first, and will not be the last, person in the marketing industry to question why so many major B2C brands make it so ridiculously hard for their customers to engage with them. Frankly, at this stage of the evolution of marketing as a profession, it is time our industry demonstrated to business leaders how poor engagement affects sales and how good engagement grows market and profit share faster than anything else!
I attended a large Marketing Conference last year in LA and the theme was Customer Engagement. Look, it was a good solid event, but one participant did facetiously point out to me at a cocktail function that the three previous years were themed as Customer Interaction; Customer-Centred Marketing and Customer Intimacy. I never checked if they were the real names but the point he was making is that our industry just seems to keep repeating the same theories and re-labelling them, and yet we don't seem to be winning the battle with the people who design processes and service delivery in the business. Its someone else, with apparently more power, who is driving the customer engagement plan in the business and doesn't have a clue what they are doing, because (in my bank's case) if they had a clue it wouldn't take me 10minutes before I'm able to actually 'engage'!!! Newsflash: engagement should be frictionless.
Now, lets focus on a brilliant example of a company that does get this stuff!
NRMA Insurance (http://www.nrma.com.au/insurance.shtml), a major Australian insurance brand, part of Insurance Australia Group (IAG), launched a new campaign called "Unworry" in 2008. The essence of the campaign is that life should be easy, without stress, worry and without so much friction! Well, that's my take on it anyway.
The great thing about this campaign is that marketing has driven holistic changes through all the points of engagement by customers. The campaign is a by-product of a very real and substantive change to the way the business delivers its offering and its service. The campaign fulfills the business strategy.
Of course, as a polished marketing outfit, IAG have made all the brand touchpoints perfectly reflect the campaign messaging. The style and voice of the IVR 'operator', the website, ATL and BTL marketing. Its all consistent, clear, uncluttered and distinctive, which is great. But what's better is that the offers, and the systems and processes to deliver the offers and the subsequent service all actually live up to the campaign promise. NRMA told me that life should be easy and when I had to renew my car insurance yesterday IT WAS EASY!!!! Hallelujah, a B2C brand that has integrated its messaging and the reality of its business. I love it. And that's what great customer engagement is about isn't it? To ultimately get customers to associate a positive emotional response to the brand.
At this point I should say that IAG is a client of Orbis. Has been for 10 years. All of that stuff they produce in marketing goes through the Orbis Marketing system, helping them get to market faster (making their marketer's lives easier). But more importantly, I've been a personal customer of IAG for 21 years. There's been plenty of potential churn points along the way and they've managed to keep me. Based upon their current approach to customer engagement I expect they've got a great chance of keeping me for a long time to come.
Happy marketing.
Grant
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Simplify marketing for your sales channels (LAM)...
By Clive Roberts, Head of APAC Sales
One of the key challenges facing all marketers is how to ensure consistent and relevant messaging and communications are delivered through the sales channel, particularly when that sales channel is provided by a third party like an adviser, broker, reseller, franchise operator - or even one of your own retail outlets.
While it is essential that these sales “footsoldiers” are able to customise and personalise infield offers, local promotions and co-branded campaigns, the very thought of allowing them to tamper with your cherished brand guidelines and expensively researched value propositions is enough to give most senior marketing executives heart palpitations.
As a result, marketers seek to limit the risk of brand tampering by arranging huge centralised print runs of posters and collateral, each featuring blocks of blank space in which the channel can print, or just write, the requisite local content. As a control mechanism this approach can be reasonably effective – but it is fundamentally lacking in efficiency and practicality. A visit to the storeroom of your average third party sales channel will very quickly give you an indication of the huge implications of the cost and logistics waste created by this practice.
What is really needed is for your sales channels to be able to print localised collateral on-demand at the point of use – without having to rely on your agency or in-house team to customize every piece they need. A number of software solutions have offered limited versions of this capability for a few years now, but these have generally lacked scale and been unable to service a large or global channel footprint. They were typically offered by printing companies which sought to lock the user in to using a particular print provider, and were quite rudimentary in terms of their design capabilities. As you can imagine, this limited design functionality was very frustrating to the creative department, who had to adjust from working in a professional creative suite like Adobe, to trying to maintain their high quality work in a system with inadequate tools.
Orbis solves this marketing dilemma with our ArtBuild solution – a robust and scalable solution combining the OrbisMarketing platform with the world’s best graphics-industry technology from Adobe. Artbuild gives your team the best of both worlds. The studio (whether in-house or agency) can develop sophisticated creative pieces using their standard toolset, and then deploy them as templates for localisation by the field. Your marketers post the templates to your Orbis Marketing Knowledge Centre (a library of all your digital assets) alongside a corresponding range of approved personalisation imagery, copy, and content which the field marketer or channel can use to customise the template. You can even give them the option to develop their own copy and content for certain limited fields. Such a system ensures that brand guidelines are easily maintained throughout the life of each piece, and when pieces expire or a relevant campaign ends they are immediately taken out of market.
The benefits:
§ Marketing gets greater brand control
§ The field gets personalized content when they need it
§ Massive design and production cost savings
If you are one of the many marketing executives out there who are grappling with how you can better support your salesforce and develop your relationship with senior sales executives, give Orbis a call, and we can help you discover how other leading marketing organizations have overcome these, and other issues.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Real-time visibility across Marketing Funds: Part 2
So, further to the previous post, what happened with this Orbis client who had such issues with financial information in marketing?
This company now considers itself to be ‘excellent at marketing financial management’. How they got there seems simple, but in reality took a lot of Executive Commitment and support for a significant change.
The VP Marketing sponsored a project to implement the Orbis Marketing Planning & Financials solution. But more than just software, the executive team understood that it was important to promote and push for a long term change in behavior across marketing.
The Orbis Business Adoption program is helping to implement this, by focusing on 'Adoption', we have been able to help marketing to use the software effectively. All marketing teams now use financial data in all decision making; the executive team can rely on the data being accurate and timely; and the marketing results are measurably improved.
I guess it just shows how one event can be a catalyst for positive long-term change.
Has anyone else seen an event or issue that created an opportunity for long-term change?
More soon, Liam
This company now considers itself to be ‘excellent at marketing financial management’. How they got there seems simple, but in reality took a lot of Executive Commitment and support for a significant change.
The VP Marketing sponsored a project to implement the Orbis Marketing Planning & Financials solution. But more than just software, the executive team understood that it was important to promote and push for a long term change in behavior across marketing.
The Orbis Business Adoption program is helping to implement this, by focusing on 'Adoption', we have been able to help marketing to use the software effectively. All marketing teams now use financial data in all decision making; the executive team can rely on the data being accurate and timely; and the marketing results are measurably improved.
I guess it just shows how one event can be a catalyst for positive long-term change.
Has anyone else seen an event or issue that created an opportunity for long-term change?
More soon, Liam
Real-time visibility across Marketing Funds: Part 1
This story comes directly from one Orbis’ clients. It is a great reminder of the value in management information being close to hand. Hope you get some value out of it.
The VP Marketing received a call from a regional GM. “My team hasn’t been tracking their costs effectively and have overspent my budget. I need more money”.
The VP Marketing thought: “This happens every year”. (She kept a stash of budget aside for such an event).
However, this simple request produced other, more important questions:
How much budget was available from other funds?
How had this GM allowed the budget to be overspent? Was this a systemic issue across the business?
Three days later, the information the VP needed still had not arrived. On the fourth day, the information arrived but was simply wrong.
The problem was that each Marketing team had different definitions for Financial terms.
Words such as “Committed” and “Forecast” (e.g. some Marketers defined “Committed” as how much they had promised to suppliers, even if just through a handshake agreement; but Finance defined “Committed” as Purchase Order raised).
This lack of standardization meant the financial data was inconsistent and the VP was still unable to make a decision on the reallocation of funds for the GM.
Moreover, 22 people had been involved in answering these questions! The VP had asked seven GMs for their information; the GMs had asked nine of their people who in turn had brought in six more Marketing staff to assist.
So, one question led to an avalanche of inefficient activity. A question that should have taken almost no time to answer, had taken up over 200 hours of the organisation’s time.
And the data was still incorrect.
The VP’s dilemma was significant. “How can I run this business if I don’t have consistent financial information?” she asked herself. “We are an international brand, recognized around the world – we simply can not be so inefficient at financial decision making”.
Liam Royes
Director, Product & Solutions Group
The VP Marketing received a call from a regional GM. “My team hasn’t been tracking their costs effectively and have overspent my budget. I need more money”.
The VP Marketing thought: “This happens every year”. (She kept a stash of budget aside for such an event).
However, this simple request produced other, more important questions:
How much budget was available from other funds?
How had this GM allowed the budget to be overspent? Was this a systemic issue across the business?
Three days later, the information the VP needed still had not arrived. On the fourth day, the information arrived but was simply wrong.
The problem was that each Marketing team had different definitions for Financial terms.
Words such as “Committed” and “Forecast” (e.g. some Marketers defined “Committed” as how much they had promised to suppliers, even if just through a handshake agreement; but Finance defined “Committed” as Purchase Order raised).
This lack of standardization meant the financial data was inconsistent and the VP was still unable to make a decision on the reallocation of funds for the GM.
Moreover, 22 people had been involved in answering these questions! The VP had asked seven GMs for their information; the GMs had asked nine of their people who in turn had brought in six more Marketing staff to assist.
So, one question led to an avalanche of inefficient activity. A question that should have taken almost no time to answer, had taken up over 200 hours of the organisation’s time.
And the data was still incorrect.
The VP’s dilemma was significant. “How can I run this business if I don’t have consistent financial information?” she asked herself. “We are an international brand, recognized around the world – we simply can not be so inefficient at financial decision making”.
Liam Royes
Director, Product & Solutions Group
What Salvador Dali Teaches the Modern Marketer
By Clive Roberts, Head of Orbis APAC Sales.
Last night the Orbis team went with some of our clients to the Salvador Dali 'Liquid Desire' exhibition at the National Gallery Of Victoria, in Melbourne Australia. It was great to meet with them in a more relaxed environment. There's been a lot of hard work on both sides delivering some big projects. The most significant of these for a major Telco was delivered across hundreds of users on time and on budget.
The exhibition was fantastic. It certainly exceeded my expectations. Not only the quality of the works on display, but the volume of work. The Mad Spaniard was certainly a productive fellow.
What intrigues me was how adaptable & innovative Dali was.
Attempting to bring some relevance to the marketing discipline, as tenuous as that may be, was his willingness to ply his talent to new media forms in such an innovative fashion. It's maybe not too far a stretch as he did some wacky adverts for leading brands. Of course these are now artworks in their own right. I reckon he'd have quite a following on Facebook were he still around.
Dali would seek out the best talent in a particular space (Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, Coco Chanel etc) and bring a whole new perspective and interpretation to the form, be it photography, theatre, movies (nominated for Best picture apparently) Jewelry... you name it.
He was also big into reuse. Some of his themes (motifs and Symbols - clocks, ants, food -weird stuff really) played out decades later in that period's contemporary style. He wasn't afraid to go back into the archives and take something from the past and bring it back to life in a new form. This obviously would get the critics wagging with deep and meaningful (and I think sometimes irrelevant) interpretations.
We see some savvy marketers who going back to their classic campaigns, or representations of their brands and refreshing them into today's initiatives. So as marketers appreciate today, new media doesn't mean abandoning tried and true methods, but rather applying them appropriately to reinforce the brand and the proposition in new more interactive channels. Innovation and experimentation can lead to some fascinating outcomes.
How does any of this relate to what we do at Orbis? Well quite simply, too much time in marketing is spent in administration instead of finding time, and the head-space, to think creatively, and to come up with big ideas. Its nice to dream that one day you will find the time to do this, but what is actually effective is to systemise the adminsitrative aspects of marketing to free up the opportunity to live that dream.
Clive Roberts
Head of Sales, APAC
Last night the Orbis team went with some of our clients to the Salvador Dali 'Liquid Desire' exhibition at the National Gallery Of Victoria, in Melbourne Australia. It was great to meet with them in a more relaxed environment. There's been a lot of hard work on both sides delivering some big projects. The most significant of these for a major Telco was delivered across hundreds of users on time and on budget.
The exhibition was fantastic. It certainly exceeded my expectations. Not only the quality of the works on display, but the volume of work. The Mad Spaniard was certainly a productive fellow.
What intrigues me was how adaptable & innovative Dali was.
Attempting to bring some relevance to the marketing discipline, as tenuous as that may be, was his willingness to ply his talent to new media forms in such an innovative fashion. It's maybe not too far a stretch as he did some wacky adverts for leading brands. Of course these are now artworks in their own right. I reckon he'd have quite a following on Facebook were he still around.
Dali would seek out the best talent in a particular space (Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, Coco Chanel etc) and bring a whole new perspective and interpretation to the form, be it photography, theatre, movies (nominated for Best picture apparently) Jewelry... you name it.
He was also big into reuse. Some of his themes (motifs and Symbols - clocks, ants, food -weird stuff really) played out decades later in that period's contemporary style. He wasn't afraid to go back into the archives and take something from the past and bring it back to life in a new form. This obviously would get the critics wagging with deep and meaningful (and I think sometimes irrelevant) interpretations.
We see some savvy marketers who going back to their classic campaigns, or representations of their brands and refreshing them into today's initiatives. So as marketers appreciate today, new media doesn't mean abandoning tried and true methods, but rather applying them appropriately to reinforce the brand and the proposition in new more interactive channels. Innovation and experimentation can lead to some fascinating outcomes.
How does any of this relate to what we do at Orbis? Well quite simply, too much time in marketing is spent in administration instead of finding time, and the head-space, to think creatively, and to come up with big ideas. Its nice to dream that one day you will find the time to do this, but what is actually effective is to systemise the adminsitrative aspects of marketing to free up the opportunity to live that dream.
Clive Roberts
Head of Sales, APAC
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Demand is Arising...
I'm presently in the UK visiting with our EMEA operation. I try to spend at least a quarter of my year out of HQ and London is always a favorite place to come to. (The timing has nothing to do with the Ashes cricket series being on either!) :)
Our business in the Europe is growing substantially at the moment and I always find it interesting when I travel to compare the drivers behind takeup of our marketing software from one country to the next.
I'm certain that there has been an uptick in recent months in UK companies starting to look more deeply at systemisation initatives for marketing. In talking to our clients and prospects there seems to be a gradual increase in confidence each month. Companies that have done their down-sizing are now starting to look outward and are realising that if they are to sieze growth opportunities they will be increasing marketing effort BUT they have less resources to do this. Its a classic productivity problem of course, and the solution is to automate and eliminate waste and unnecessary process friction. The answer is defintely not to just do what you were doing before you downsized!
Despite the recession, Orbis just completed an amazing full financial year ( to the end of June 09), with a 64% year on year growth, and its our expectation that growth will continue at high rates in our market. I think this is because our solutions deliver fast returns, whether a client needs to quickly and directly eliminate costs or has a bigger strategic vision for more efficient and effective marketing.
The exceptional efforts of Paypal, an Orbis client in the UK, is a great example of how a progressive marketing team has implemented a solution really quickly and started reaping rewards literally within days of taking up the solution. You can read the interview-style case study here: http://www.orbisglobal.com/Content_Common/pg-PayPal-Case-Study.seo.
I know I'm biased but I think its one of the coolest success stories I've read in the software game for a while!
Yours in fast returns,
Grant
Our business in the Europe is growing substantially at the moment and I always find it interesting when I travel to compare the drivers behind takeup of our marketing software from one country to the next.
I'm certain that there has been an uptick in recent months in UK companies starting to look more deeply at systemisation initatives for marketing. In talking to our clients and prospects there seems to be a gradual increase in confidence each month. Companies that have done their down-sizing are now starting to look outward and are realising that if they are to sieze growth opportunities they will be increasing marketing effort BUT they have less resources to do this. Its a classic productivity problem of course, and the solution is to automate and eliminate waste and unnecessary process friction. The answer is defintely not to just do what you were doing before you downsized!
Despite the recession, Orbis just completed an amazing full financial year ( to the end of June 09), with a 64% year on year growth, and its our expectation that growth will continue at high rates in our market. I think this is because our solutions deliver fast returns, whether a client needs to quickly and directly eliminate costs or has a bigger strategic vision for more efficient and effective marketing.
The exceptional efforts of Paypal, an Orbis client in the UK, is a great example of how a progressive marketing team has implemented a solution really quickly and started reaping rewards literally within days of taking up the solution. You can read the interview-style case study here: http://www.orbisglobal.com/Content_Common/pg-PayPal-Case-Study.seo.
I know I'm biased but I think its one of the coolest success stories I've read in the software game for a while!
Yours in fast returns,
Grant
Saturday, June 13, 2009
The Orbis Vision
As the first post on new Orbis blog where better to start than with the vision for Orbis? (http://www.orbisglobal.com/).
Our vision is to be the world's best marketing management software company.
What I like most about our vision is it enables our team huge scope to apply the vision to everything we do. Even within a small tactical decision an Orbis employee will ask themselves "what would be the world's best effort and outcome for this job?". This aspiration is fundamental to the culture at our company.
A vision statement is the ultimate end-state that management wants a company to be. The vision is a grand aspiration that keeps drawing a team forward. It should inspire continuous growth and development. Being the best in a sector is not something you can attain and then just keep. At any point in time our competition will be doing some things better than us, so our vision inspires us to keep on striving in all areas of Orbis to get ahead and keep ahead of our competitors.
What does our vision to be the world's best marketing management software business mean to the different stakeholders of Orbis?
Our vision is to be the world's best marketing management software company.
What I like most about our vision is it enables our team huge scope to apply the vision to everything we do. Even within a small tactical decision an Orbis employee will ask themselves "what would be the world's best effort and outcome for this job?". This aspiration is fundamental to the culture at our company.
A vision statement is the ultimate end-state that management wants a company to be. The vision is a grand aspiration that keeps drawing a team forward. It should inspire continuous growth and development. Being the best in a sector is not something you can attain and then just keep. At any point in time our competition will be doing some things better than us, so our vision inspires us to keep on striving in all areas of Orbis to get ahead and keep ahead of our competitors.
What does our vision to be the world's best marketing management software business mean to the different stakeholders of Orbis?
- For shareholders, it means the best return on capital of all the players in our space. And it also means long term growth and viability. These are measurable objectives. I often get asked 'why isn't your vision to be the world's 'leading' player, or the 'biggest'? Pretty easy really: there is no correlation between long term shareholder value and being the biggest player in a market. Just look at General Motors, or Enron! I believe that in achieving the best long term shareholder value a more sophisticated approach is needed by balancing the desire for rapid growth with the need to ensure long term viability. We want to be in the right geographical markets at the right time; with the right product features and the right partnerships that deliver a unique and compelling value proposition to our clients. Being the best requires us to make disciplined decisions and stay the course.
- For our clients, being the best means providing sophisticated solutions that are easy to deploy, manage and use. It annoys me to hear some of the horror stories I've heard in the last year about some of our competitors' implementations. It annoys me because marketers who are genuinely trying to improve their business don't deserve buggy and hard-to-use systems. They don't deserve to be putting out fires all the time instead of getting on with the job of marketing in a more automated way! At Orbis, we look very carefully at the full lifecycle of our client relationships and at every point provide high value solutions and services that are easy to take up. We do things very differently to our competition and it works.
- For our employees, it means learning and growing both professionally and personally. It means working not only for a company with financial goals but for a company that is making a real and sustaining difference to our clients' businesses and their daily lives at work. If you are going to be the best company in the world at what you do then it needs to be a great place to work! This means we work a lot at our culture, really undertanding our values and the attitudes and behaviours that align with those values. Being the best means investing in our people and rewarding them for not only what they achieve but how they go about achieving it. We know that the right culture is paramount in long term success.
- For our partners it means being reliable and flexible; treating them like extensions of our business and investing time and effort into our relationships. It means being open to new ideas and ways of working together, and it means being loyal.
- For our suppliers, being the best marketing management software company in the world means that we expect the same level of excellence from them that we seek to provide our clients. We work with our suppliers ethically and with long term partnership as our goal.
- For the communities we operate in we strive to find ways to make a positive difference through the use of our time, skills and our financial resources.
Our vision is a constant source of inspiration and direction. There are things we will do exceptionally well sometimes, and other times where we will fall short. But one thing is for sure, the Orbis team will always be moving forward to be the best in our space.
Ciao for now, Grant
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