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

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

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?

• 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