India’s largest ride-sharing service, Ola, is coming to Britain. It’s news that will make not just Uber sit up and pay attention.
A major challenge to succeed with customers and to hire drivers will be brand recognition. “It is not known,” says Yugal Joshi from Everest Group, a research firm. “[It will need] a meaningful marketing blitz around its entry, create incentives for drivers, work with regulators to better understand the constructs, and understand the taxi habits of UK passengers,” he adds. What it shouldn’t do is market taxis as an alternative to other modes of transport, as it does in India. Instead, Joshi argues, it should make it essential for British commuters.
At the Procurecon Indirect conference in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago, three senior procurement people from different corporations approached me with their woes about the lack of control and the high levels of procurement indiscipline their marketing departments exhibit. They wanted to know how and if Everest Group could solve the problem of rogue spend with external agencies for marketing services. It’s an interesting and very valid question.
Marketing services is one area in which many enterprises’ Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) have had neither the evidence nor the mandate to challenge established thinking. Furthermore, unlike IT and non-core business process outsourcing alternatives that have been around for 20 years, outsourcing options for marketing didn’t exist until recently. Now that they do, CPOs are sensing the opportunity, in partnership with Chief Marketing Officers, to transform the way marketing services are delivered.
Benchmarking can certainly provide rate-card analysis, SLA review, a breakdown of the cost-stack, and any number of other elements from the contract, to give a view of pricing and equitable contracting. But there are problems:
But, as one of my Procurecon conversations suggested, the issues for CPOs aren’t high levels of spend or a desire to be in control of every spending decision. Rather, they’re concerned about fragmented spend and lack of overall visibility.
They can begin by promoting the procurement function as an exemplar of best practice by pointing to examples in other spend categories of how procurement has driven cost savings, improved quality, or stimulated innovation. Doing so establishes CPOs’ leadership credentials.
Next, they can introduce some level of technology that will deliver at least visibility into spend. Several speakers at the conference cited the need for the procurement process to generate data to increase efficiency. Many CPOs without a mandate for category management seem reluctant to push for integrated procure-to-pay or source-to-contract systems. But less invasive approaches, such as customized applications in Salesforce, could still generate useful information about spend categories, transaction volumes, and whether suppliers are being contracted by separate groups within an enterprise.
Third, they can consider portfolio rationalisation, against these rationales:
Next, they can investigate alternatives. Arguably, marketing services and creative agency spend are still immature enough to offer the opportunity to arbitrage. And providers with capability are rapidly emerging. Accenture has acquired over 20 agencies since 2010. Onsite digital design agencies such as NuFu, Oliver, and Spark44 have a growing impact. Every major service provider – Atos, Cognizant, Sutherland Global, Wipro, etc. – is investing in or acquiring digital agencies, and these investments will allow enterprises to consider accessing marketing services alongside a suite of outsourced IT or business process services.
Finally, they can benchmark the status quo with an alternative. Can a sourced solution give the enterprise not only a cost advantage but also faster delivery, access to global talent, measurable outcomes, and real transparency?
So, CPOs, there’s little reason to ask yourself “how do I do it?” Instead, the real question is, “why wait?”
You can find out how Everest Group helps enterprises optimise global procurement operations here. We also help enterprises rationalise complex portfolios of external suppliers.
Hyper personalization in marketing: 5 solution partner types
Accelerating technologies are changing the core and mission of marketing groups at enterprises of all types across the globe and enabling a level of personalization that consumers are coming to expect.
Though difficult to achieve, hyper personalization in marketing is possible with these 5 key solutions
“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This quote from The Psychology of Science easily, and disconcertingly, applies to many of today’s marketers, who are vigorously using digital technologies to “nail” the multiple customer touch points – e.g., context-based services, IoT, mobility, and social collaboration – at their disposal.
Indeed, there is significant vendor sponsored “research,” from the likes of Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, and marketing consultants, that hammers home the idea that marketing has no future without digital technologies. Volumes of literature debate and explain how digital technologies are changing the role of traditional e-marketing, and that these technologies are providing the needed ammunition in terms of social conversations, mobile interfaces, and consumer analytics.
But there’s been surprisingly little discussion on whether marketers are overdoing it, whether all marketers are equally equipped to drive such technology-heavy initiatives, and whether digital marketing strategies benefit everyone, all organizations, across all industries. Here’s my take on a couple of these points.
Most marketers do not fundamentally understand technology: For example, they get carried away by Facebook likes, and overwhelmed or too excited by what they see from marketing technology vendors, such as a new content management platform, irrespective of the value delivered. Though there is “hot money” flowing for digital marketing, this should not drive the adoption of digital technologies. For example, the business case of data analytics may become an “availability heuristic bias” without realizing whether it delivers good or bad data, or whether it can produce meaningful insights and business value or just become another academic exercise to please business leaders.
Digital marketing is not about only marketing anymore: Earlier marketers could operate in their ivory towers with somewhat limited integration with the broader organization, as digital technologies were limited to email marketing, surveys, and/or occasional mobility projects. Today, however, with the plethora of customer touch-points, the fundamental shift in consumers’ interaction with a brand, the confluence of big data, the IoT, context-driven services, and mobility, marketers must realize that digital impact is broad-based across the organization. Many different departments, including production, support, supply chain, procurement, operations, customer service, and IT, need to be in synch to drive a meaningful digital marketing strategy. If the entire organization is not geared toward this transformation, the digital marketing efforts will eventually turn into traditional e-marketing, creating little business value.
Effective digital marketing should result in seamless excellent customer engagement, and requires an overhaul of multiple interconnected processes within an organization to avoid actually driving a disconnect with the customer. A plethora of digital technologies cannot improve a bad business process. Therefore, marketers have the difficult task of taking the entire organization together, explaining why process changes are required, how to improve customer touch-points, and how to build a customer experience lifecycle.
But, are marketers capable of doing this? Do they have the needed support and mandate from senior executives? Do they have the required organizational standing and stature to drive these changes? Can they fathom and swim across the political landscape and inertia of their organization?
Most importantly, marketers must keep the customer top of mind when considering use of digital technologies. The reality is that extreme technology leverage may confuse, frustrate, and overwhelm the customer. The branding message may get convoluted, confusing, and irrelevant. Though increasingly marketers are becoming more tech savvy, they should never forget their role is not to adopt latest digital technology but to serve their customers.
Digital channels are means to an end, not the end by themselves. For marketers, it is easy to get carried away by believing new technology is “digital marketing.” But what they may not realize is that “digital” may actually be killing marketing.
Photo credit: Flickr
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Contact center services in the Philippines provide a strong foundation for other service segments to build upon
The service provider community is very fond of clever terms, and SMAC — standing for Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud — is a good example of that. However, if you’re a service provider looking to sell to new or existing clients, talking about SMAC may not be the most productive way to hold the conversation.
The most productive way to uncover a significant opportunity is to talk to your customers in their language about the business issues they have. Sure, they’re looking for technology answers to their issues, but very few of them use the term SMAC of their own volition.
So if you’re talking to a retailer about their out-of-stock condition, for instance, talk about the practical ways that your solution will help them identify where they’re out of stock and how you can help them prevent that from happening.
Software tools can be very powerful. But as I’ve blogged several times in recent months, decision rights and buying influence are flowing toward the business users rather than CIOs. Providers must change terminology and communication to successfully capture their attention and serve them well.
Use simple business terms to communicate what you can do for a customer. If you use clever technology terms, you’ll probably just marginalize your impact and consign yourself to the realm of being a geek.
My advice: Keep the acronym out of your sales toolkit. Don’t SMAC your customer!
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