Fragmentation, channel proliferation, increasing contact with customers and globalisation are all contributing towards making marketing activity more multifaceted and unmanageable.
Efficiency and cost control are a priority, fuelled by shorter business cycles and increased competition. Commerce now demands enterprises to deliver profits and growth simultaneously and marketing has been affected by the current downturn like most sectors. In businesses today, marketing is directly responsible for delivering top-line revenue. Clients are demanding more and the discipline is coming under increased pressure to be ever more accountable and justify its significant budget with tangible, demonstrable returns.
Historically, automation of the marketing industry has been achieved with standard desktop tools such as spreadsheets, email and project management tools, or with custom-built applications. Results have been mixed as standard tools have not met the specific needs of marketers, while custom-built applications have proved expensive, hard to maintain and lack the functionality required to gain organisation-wide roll out and acceptance.
It is the frustrations and unfulfilled IT needs of the marketing profession that have brought about the conception, birth and increasing use of Marketing Resource Management. It is true to say that at present, MRM may appear to be another buzzword, like that of CRM, but I believe it presents a very real and significant opportunity for the marketing industry and is here to stay. This software genuinely improves bottom-line performance for any marketing organisation.
Team productivity can be increased dramatically by recreating job-bags electronically in a secure web-browser environment. Users then can literally dip in and out of the job bags in real time to check the progress of work, issue instructions, sign-off approvals and plan who needs to work on what next. This significantly reduces the amount of time needed to manage each job. In some cases, the number of steps taken to produce a job have fallen from over 30 to less than 10.
MRM can revolutionise the way in which clients, agencies and other suppliers work together. Sharing information in electronic job bags improves collaboration, improves quality, saves time and lowers costs. MRM collaboration tools are also used to improve the way that marketing managers work with colleagues in other offices or countries.
Brand control is also dramatically improved by tracking which brand assets are used in jobs and providing marketing templates for users "in the field". This ensures that all marketing execution uses correct brand content and is properly approved.
Tremendous cost savings are also offered. Online procurement tools let marketers buy from suppliers electronically. In some cases, savings of up to 50% on purchases, such as print, have been achieved. It also provides agencies with new revenue earning opportunities. Several agencies now offer MRM-based solutions to clients as an extra value-added service. Popular examples include solutions such as local marketing toolkits or brand extranets. Agencies also offer clients their own marketing dashboard, which allows clients to log on at any time and view jobs in progress. Clients feel more connected to the marketing process and no longer waste time chasing agency staff for progress reports, proofs and approvals. The result, therefore, is improved relationships, better client retention and better margins.
Some marketers have already enjoyed ROI from their implementation of MRM, often in terms of weeks rather than years. Research undertaken by the analyst Gartner in 2002 estimates that by 2005, more than 30% of the Fortune 1000 organisations will have implemented MRM at some level.
The traditional view is that IT hinders marketing and stifles creativity. I believe that this view is out of date. MRM makes marketing more efficient and actually gives staff more time to add real value rather than push paper. It also provides management with information about marketing activity that simply has not been available before.
Marketing at last has software to call its own. Whether marketers choose to take up MRM ultimately remains to be seen, but I challenge any agency or corporate marketing department willing to try this software tool that once they experience its benefits they will not look back.
Matthew Atkinson is chief executive officer of .
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