Business
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When inviting tenders from suppliers, you should always ask: “If your existing supplier withdraws their service, how would you ensure business continuity?”
Your company may be obliged to review and retender its supplier contracts from time to time. Or maybe you’re not happy with your existing print supplier (or agency or props supplier). Nevertheless, divorcing them and finding someone new can be a real headache.
After all, that marketing agency or print manufacturer might have let themselves go a bit. But at least they understand your quirks. Your likes and dislikes. Even if they don’t always go along with them.
Add to this the risk of a failure in supply if the divorce gets messy, and you could be moving from a business continuity issue to disaster recovery.
Mitigating risk
Let’s say you put £25 million in print a year through your main print supplier. That’s a lot of work for them to lose, and they’re unlikely to be happy about the loss.
They may hold significant assets and imagery of yours that suddenly become difficult to find. Their presses might suddenly become very busy. They may just tell you they’re not interested in a smooth transition to your new supplier, helping to bed them in and handing over the work project by project.
If they simply walk away, can your new supplier pick up the pieces on day one?
New supplier responsibilities
We’ve transitioned in the region of £250 million of print to our supply chain over the past five years. That means we understand how much incumbent suppliers vary in their willingness to play ball with smooth transitions.
We know that an airtight disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity is essential during a handover between suppliers. Our experience has given us a certain expertise in business continuity – and your new supplier should have that expertise, too.
Requests for proposals (RFP) tend to focus on normal delivery conditions. However, you need to know before you appoint a new supplier how they would cope under extraordinary conditions.
Business continuity plan
Whatever timescale you agree with your new supplier, you should receive guarantees that they can activate their business continuity plan immediately should the supply chain fail.
This should include:
• Full production capacity and capability from day one
• Plan in place to transfer stock to a fully operational warehouse in a timescale that causes no disruption to logistics
• Pre-agreed and named transition team able to be in place from day one
• Ability to deploy any software required to replace an incumbent’s, should this be required
Following this immediate response, you need to ensure that the potential supplier also has a tested plan in place that covers areas (in the case of print) such as materials availability, communications, stock information, data requirements, and much more. Different types of supplier need to cover different areas.
Probably most importantly, they shouldn’t charge you a premium to deliver early. At the proposal stage, ensure their commitment to being fully transparent and guaranteed pricing in the event you trigger the disaster recovery plan during the transition.
Ideally, you want a civilised divorce from your incumbent supplier, where no one talks about disaster recovery.
Nevertheless, if you don’t interrogate your prospective suppliers’ business continuity plans during the RFP process, you may be courting disaster.
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People talk about ‘Death by PowerPoint’, but the biggest killer in marketing is not PowerPoint, but its Microsoft stablemate: the Excel spreadsheet.
Among the numerous big brands and retailers we consult with about helping them make their marketing operations more efficient, the most commonly occurring statement I hear is, “can you do anything about all these spreadsheets?” – usually accompanied by pulling out of hair and a sallow-faced, wide-eyed look of despair.
As it turns out, there is something we can do about it – but more about that later. First, what is it that makes marketers refer to their campaign spreadsheets by such affectionate names as the Spreadsheet of Doom or the Squares of Despair?
The first horror is version control. When companies run their campaigns and allocations via spreadsheets, there’s necessarily a requirement for several departments to be involved. Legion are the stories of departments all working off different versions, leading to the wrong assets being briefed, the wrong amount of print being ordered, and the wrong allocations being sent to stores.
Excel almost encourages easy mistakes. Delete one figure linked to a formula, and you can throw whole rows of important data out.
Checking and checking
There are also tortuously long checking processes to ensure all the information that has been put into a master spreadsheet by everyone from legal to HR to procurement is accurate and matches up.
“I’ve got a marketing degree,” I was told recently, “but I’ve just spent my afternoon running my finger over a spreadsheet.”
When you couple Excel issues with communications via email, with all the lack of visibility for anyone not in that particular chain, emails going into junk folders, and people never being able to find the right email, even when they have a vague recollection of receiving it, you have a recipe for errors and vast unnecessary duplication of effort.
Some of our recommendation to companies looking to us to help drive efficiencies is about process; the rest is about technology.
MRM efficiency
In an efficient marketing operation, the two go hand-in-hand. Manual campaign planning, email briefings and approvals, assets held on suppliers’ hard drives, store allocations spreadsheets (and guesswork) – all of these and more can be replaced by an efficient and flexible MRM platform.
Everything you require to run your operation is in one place, accessible to anyone with permissions, and with only one version of any data – the one within the system. All briefings, amendment and approval information is held in an easily accessible part of the software, rather than in the middle of a virtual forest of emails.
With the right MRM system, you can say goodbye to the Spreadsheet of Doom altogether – and get on with doing all those nice strategic things you dreamed of when you were doing your marketing degree.
Until next time
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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The most successful businesses are those with the most open employee communications. Simon Ward explains how you can strengthen staff engagement and morale as your business grows through a comprehensive internal comms strategy.
It’s good to talkA flat hierarchy with good communication across the organisation is easy to manage when you’re a small company. And it’s desirable. Morale and work output suffer when you feel you’re being treated like a mushroom.
The difficulty comes when your organisation grows. As you increase in size – and expand across various sites – regular on-site team meetings become unwieldy and impractical. It’s easy for operations to silo and people to become blinkered to what’s happening outside their immediate environment.
We’ve grown from a few dozen people five years ago to over 550 people now. A lot of this expansion has been in the past two years, and it was clear the existing internal comms strategy would soon become woefully inadequate.We’ve found there isn’t one single way of cultivating engagement and ensuring knowledge is shared: we have to use multiple channels to ensure no-one is missed. There are the obvious, of course: social media team pages where account members share ideas that motivate others; various cross-site social and sporting activities, which help to break down silos.
But we’ve also recently introduced the idea of largescreen videoconferencing across the entire organisation, where everyone can question me directly about the direction the company and put forward suggestions.We’ve also launched a rewards portal that features benefits and more light-hearted communicatons about the business (two-thirds of employees signed up on the first day). We also join schemes that enable employees from different departments to spend a day on joint charity projects.
I’m also told we’re about to run an inter-site Mario Kart tournament over the net.
The ideal is that the employee-run channels inspire constant willing engagement, but peaks and troughs are inevitable. Therefore, the channels have to be managed. We’ve recently expanded our comms team, and they work very closely with HR to ensure that all activity is working to inform and inspire those about areas of the company they’re not directly involved in.
As we continue to grow, the challenge will only become greater. But the key is never to let up and ensure internal comms remains a constant priority.”Until next time
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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Keep creativity alive in a world of distraction
“Yes, I’m a marketing manager, but really I’m a project manager… I just don’t have the resource to be creative.”
I heard this comment from an audience member at a recent round table event hosted by The Drum, where I was invited to sit on the panel.
The title of the event was “When Marketers are not Marketers”, and joining me at the table were senior marketers from M&S, SABMiller and the IAB.
We all agreed that strong creativity leads to positive results in marketing, but we had to acknowledge that the time marketers have to be creative is severely restricted by the additional admin, procurement and reporting responsibilities that are increasingly piled on them.
The challenge for marketers, as Tina Kataria, SABMiller’s global category manager for agency sourcing, so succinctly put it, is to “keep creativity alive in a world of distraction.”
Improving the value of marketing
And these distractions are multiplying, driven by more digital channels, increasing accountability and ever-rising budgetary pressure. These budgetary pressures can lead to demands for cost cutting, which can be disastrous if not tied to increases in efficiency and improvements in the value of marketing activity.
There can be other fall-out too. As the IAB’s Steve Chester said, “cost-cutting can mean agency margins being squeezed, often leading to bad creative and driving down value.”
Adding to these issues, traditional notions of customer engagement and loyalty have been blown out of the water.“Customers are indifferent,” said fellow panellist Richard Jones, head of design and production at M&S. “That is the job marketing has to deal with.”
Overcoming this indifference and building brand engagement means devoting more time to creative strategy and customer engagement, not less. And this means reclaiming time and resource for creative thinking by reducing the admin burden.
So that’s the conundrum we discussed at length: how to increase creativity in the face of demands for greater efficiency and value, and the avalanche of admin and process. It’s a problem I encounter all the time, and fortunately it does have a solution.
Technology is key
Many of the time-consuming tasks that are taking marketers away from addressing the urgent needs of creatively encouraging customer engagement – managing campaigns, suppliers, assets, briefing, approvals – can be handed over to technology.
The panel had a very interesting discussion on the difference between those in marketing who understand the value of technology and those who don’t.
Technology impacts everyone in business, because it’s where the savings lie. The right marketing automation achieves the double hit of freeing up your time to focus on creativity – most likely why you got into the job in the first place – and delivering those cost savings demanded by the board.
Joined-up marketing
A joined-up approach to marketing operations that embraces technology can deliver hard savings through better and more transparent briefings and approvals, reducing reworks and delivery time.
It can provide improved adherence to CPAs, enabling you to do more in the time available, as well as providing the obvious major time and efficiency improvements by banishing spreadsheets and manual ways of working.You’ll see a reduction in emails for each job, and savings from reduced reliance on freelance resource.
Efficient automated workflows give you the extra time you need to properly plan and develop strategy, while the visibility technology can provide of your entire operation enables you to measure campaign effectiveness to facilitate better planning and budget allocation.
We concluded that there are, in effect, two streams to marketing: ideas-driven marketing and data-driven marketing.
The first relies on good people with inspirational ideas, good instincts and, crucially, the time required to develop creative strategies and put them into effect.
The second provides the operation efficiency, value and reporting required, but it is time-consuming unless supported by the right technology – technology that frees up time for the ideas-driven marketing that can overcome consumer indifference.
Perhaps when all companies take this approach, we’ll be able to come back to the Drum for an event entitled “When Marketers ARE Marketers”. I look forward to the day.
Until next time…
Simon Ward
You can read The Drum’s write up of the event.
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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Simon Ward explains how, by using Media Centre and SP, Inspired Thinking Group has solved the conundrum of local marketing.
As your company grows, and operations silo, having a complete view of your marketing activity becomes increasingly difficult. You may find ways of running a slick national marketing operation, but what about your local outlets?
Local stores make up large retailers’ bricks and mortar frontline, and progressive companies are finding that investing a bigger part of their budget in local marketing can reap enormous benefits: basing campaigns on local knowledge of customer demographics and preferences can deliver big ROI rewards.
The downside is you can lose visibility and control. Keeping your national activity joined up is tough enough, but how do you ensure your local managers come up with intelligent local marketing strategies and produce only on-brand assets?
Added to that, where are your local managers going to find the time to run a multichannel marketing campaign? They’re too busy trying to run a shop. This is the conundrum: if the only way you can get local marketing to work is to put in huge amounts of resource from central marketing, you might as well go back to a one-size-fits-all national strategy.
Making local marketing work
Over the years, Inspired Thinking Group has had a lot of time to work out how to unravel this knot. We work with brands that have large retail outlets – including car manufacturers Renault and SKODA – and those with smaller outlets, such as Weight Watchers, whose local leaders and meetings we support.
In every case, we have helped devise local marketing programmes that increase local footfall and sales, use guaranteed compliant assets and give complete visibility to the central team. As a bonus, local managers report increasing satisfaction with national marketing support as the programme matures.
How have we done it?
Key factors in local marketing success
Neither technology nor local marketing expertise on their own can unravel this knot. Both are required – and they have to work seamlessly together.
First, the technology. Local and national operations need a simple-to-use platform that stores all assets and can be viewed by all required parties. The software needs to be able to schedule campaigns, keep track of budgets and handle bespoke requests.
In 2010, we found exactly the software we needed in Media Centre by Total Marketing Services. Media Centre is an advanced marketing resource management platform built around core modules – Asset Library, Local Marketing, Workflow Manager, and so on – so marketers only need to invest in the functionality they need.
We were so impressed, we – sorry about the cliché – but we bought the company.
Six years of development later, Media Centre now sits at the heart of many of our clients’ marketing operations, with the Local Marketing module providing the means for local managers to run geographically relevant, compliant campaigns, with full visibility for central marketing.
Our Status Pro (SP) reporting app provides realtime campaign data on any desktop or mobile browser, combining Media Centre data with information from numerous other sources, including Google Analytics and social media activity, providing the ability for central marketing to drill down into the data to a granular level.
Central marketing creates and constantly updates a comprehensive suite of multichannel local templates that reflect national assets. These are stored in the client’s Asset Library and can be accessed through any browser. Every local manager can view, resize, amend and order any of the templated assets.
Service support
With the technology in place, the next thing is to look at service support. Local managers may not have the time or marketing expertise to run brilliant campaigns, so we provide expert local consultants who research the location, study the results of previous campaigns and recommend channel strategies for each outlet.
To ensure local executions are inexpensive, we also provide a Dynamic Template module in Media Centre that enables easy customisation of templated artwork directly through the browser. We also run a 24/7 artworking studio, dedicated to producing bespoke customisations of on-brand assets.
Our QC team ensures compliance of bespoke artworks, and all briefing, approvals, bookings and requests for quotes are handled through Media Centre.
An ITG account manager or account team works full time at the client’s head office, and is the first point of contact for all Media Centre and local marketing activity.
The result is a constantly innovating local marketing programme that provides increased ROI, is on-brand, and mirrors national executions. With the extra advantage that it requires no painful admin input from either local managers or national marketers, enabling them to spend their time doing what they do best – developing creative marketing campaigns or running stores.
Read our Renault local marketing case study here
Until next time,
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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Simon Ward explains how a day can make a big difference to marketers – especially when it’s dedicated to innovation.
I’ve always been immersed in technology. As CEO of SP Group’s digital arm, I was at the cutting edge of what was on the face of it a very traditional industry – printing.
At ITG, our core offering is based around automation technology, and we’ve just taken our first steps into the big data arena, with our recent addition of ITG Creator.
But even people who run technology companies can struggle to keep up with every development – the time investment can be daunting, especially as not every invention will make it off the drawing board.
Pace of change in technology
It took decades for telephones to reach 50% of the population. It took five years for mobiles to achieve the same penetration. Innovation is not only getting faster, so is its adoption.
Companies with a competitive technology edge are better placed to attract customers than those who are baffled by technology. But there are so many areas of innovation out there, how is a marketer to find the time to keep up with them all?
We decided to help.
Over the past week, our offices have been teaming with clients. This was an innovation for us – generally we only entertain one or two clients at a time. However, over 140 clients, most of them marketers, visited our offices together, but it wasn’t just to see us. We’d invited some guests.
An appetite for innovation
Augmented reality, 3D printing, virtual reality, 360 degree cameras, interactive video, HyperSound technology – there are a huge number of technologies designed to improve retail customer engagement. We sought out the best, and invited their keepers to demo them for our clients.
Marketers from Heineken, Puma, Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury’s and numerous other retailers and brands moved from area to area, scrutinising innovation after innovation, interrogating the technology, and putting faces to buzzwords.
It’s not the most obvious tactic for a technology company, to showcase other people’s products alongside your own. But building a partnership with your clients is about more than simply selling your wares – it involves providing added value, just as they aim to give added value to their customers.
It was an exceptionally successful day, eliciting numerous positive comments. But perhaps the most satisfying were from those who said, “I knew about this technology, but until I saw the demo I didn’t realise it was for us.”
This shows that even marketers who keep up with technological innovations rarely have the time to delve deeply enough to see all the angles. Even when you attend technology exhibitions, you often spend a lot longer tracking down items of interest than you do experiencing the innovations.
A single day spent looking at a dozen specially selected technologies, with the ability to question experts in a relaxed and engaging environment, can give you a significant catch-up.
It’s certainly something we’ll be doing again.
Until next time
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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Simon Ward discusses the many reasons a company might rebrand, some admirable, some less so.
The dreaded rebrand
For instance, a company’s reputation may have become tarnished through their own activity, and they look to rebranding as a way of projecting a fresher face to their customers and investors.
Sometimes companies go through a rebrand without any attempt to tackle deeper issues, in the hope that a slap of paint will solve their woes.
In some instances, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that someone in the organisation is bored with its current image and wants to make a mark by changing the company logo from a square to a circle.
It’s no wonder rebranding can come with a stigma attached. There are always those who will whisper: if it ain’t broken, why would they fix it?
The brand refresh
But there are also laudable reasons for re-evaluating your brand. Markets evolve rapidly, channels expand and change. Successful companies grow, become too big for their original skin and must cast off a previously beneficial cocoon to emerge a butterfly.
At ITG, we haven’t gone through anything so radical as a rebrand, but we have grown rapidly in the past six years and gone from a handful of like-minded individuals to over 360 employees, working in diverse areas, from digital to artworking studio, from software developers to account teams.
We have expanded our services, gained numerous new accounts. The opportunity for the senior management team to speak to everyone in the business individually is not what it once was.
When you grow rapidly, there is a danger of people becoming siloed, disconnected from your core ethos. We therefore judged the time was ripe for a full assessment of ITG. Take stock, as it were: does everyone in the company fully understand our ethos, what we’re trying to achieve? Does the face we project – our website, our communications – reflect the company we have become?
Outsourcing or insourcing
To answer this, we engaged external agencies to speak to our clients and conduct an extensive staff consultation, so we could receive an impartial understanding of how we are perceived and where we sit in the market.
It might appear ironic that a company such as ITG, which has carried out discoveries of this kind for numerous clients, should engage the services of external agencies. But no matter how clear your focus as a C-suite on your values and business drivers, you should never mark your own homework. It is always prudent to seek the services of someone outside the business, who can look at your offering with clear mind and fresh eyes.
This doesn’t mean we didn’t involve our own employees. Far from it. There were numerous discussions both internally and between internal staff and external agencies. We invited staff to consider the big questions: who are we? What do we do? Why should companies use our services? Is there anywhere we can do better?
Revisiting the ITG website
In truth, we were pleased to discover that external perception pretty closely matched our internal perspective: no need to change the shape of our logo, after all. But certain interesting elements did come to light.
Looking at the Inspired Thinking Group (ITG) website and our own marketing communications, we discovered that what was perfectly suited to what we used to be was starting to be left behind by what we were rapidly becoming.
We set about creating a new website, based on the answers to the big questions we had considered at length. We addressed other areas of our comms, some of which were merely tweaks to ensure everything we did accurately reflected who we are.
With the new website launched and our refresh complete, I’ve had more time to consider how useful the exercise was. My conclusion? The repositioning enhancements were well worth the effort.
However, even more significant was involving others in the organisation in strategically thinking about what we do. Every job gives the holder a unique insight into their specific area, and their feedback is invaluable. But more importantly, by engaging people across the company, it encourages everyone to take greater ownership of the brand and culture they help to create: these thing are as much theirs as yours.
And that’s an outcome I’d recommend to everyone.
Until next time…
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein
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Outsourcing your creative or artworking needs to external agencies is a given in marketing. After all, that’s where the expertise lies, and where the resource can be scaled to your requirements.
When we formed Inspired Thinking Group (ITG), we determined that the agency side of our business – our Studio, with its banks of artworkers, packaging and retouching specialists, its copywriters and creatives – had to be available round-the-clock. After all, our clients are international, and the world doesn’t stop at 5.30pm Greenwich Mean Time.
But when you’re creating tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of artworks every year, you have to ensure you have a pretty robust quality control process.
Quality control
Artworkers will review what they’ve created, but it’s not sufficient for them to mark their own homework. Your production and account teams will check the artworks, but often they’ll be looking to see it correctly matches the brief, not always giving artworks that extra level of scrutiny they require.
Dedicated quality control teams are of course the way to go: people with the ability to apply a forensic level of analysis to anything that’s thrown at them.
They can be an odd sort, of course. I recently overheard one of our QC team ask his fellows the following question: “Would you say Chelsea are better than Arsenal?”
Sounds like a simple enough query, but after a short pause, the answer came back. “No. I’d say Chelsea is better than Arsenal. In this instance, you need to use ‘is’ because you’re referring to the team as a singular entity rather than individuals acting independently.”
So, you wouldn’t necessarily want them at your dinner party, but you do want them poring over your artworks.
A lesson from the publishing industry
But there’s more to efficient quality control than employing the right individuals. You also need the best possible processes in place. And where do you find those?
Strangely enough, not in the agency world, but in the world of publishing. No matter how tight our deadlines, how great our workload, national newspapers have been confronting these problems for a lot longer, and have evolved a pretty robust system.
The key lesson we took from publishing is that quality control isn’t something you do at the end of the process: it’s something you do right at the start. When our Studio receives a new creative or bespoke brief from a client, our production managers don’t give it straight to the artworkers, they give it to QC to review.
The process
The brief goes through an in-depth level of analysis – the crucial process of prequalification, before it gets anywhere near InDesign or Illustrator. Grammar and spelling are checked. Questions are asked – is this offer clear? Are there any legal implications? Are all the images correct? Is there any ambiguity in the brief? Is any information missing? If necessary, questions are fired back to our account teams and clarification sought.
This can delay getting it on to a designer’s desktop – something that can initially trouble traditionalists, who don’t feel the job has been started until they see it being designed on a Mac. However, once they realise that prequalification considerably increases the accuracy and speed of the process (through better briefs and vastly reduced amends rounds), they soon see the benefit.
Once the artwork has been created, it pays a second visit to QC for the traditional proofreading stage – to ensure the artwork has been created to brief and all the elements are correct.
The result is an enviable accuracy rate for our Studio, and a team I can always call on if I ever want to know the correct plural of octopus.
Until next time…
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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In every company there are disagreements. It wouldn’t be healthy to employ people who agree with you on everything. You need people who not only come up with their own ideas, but who question yours.
It’s good to draw your talent from different pools: people who have different experiences and approaches to issues. Sometimes they can show you an angle you haven’t considered, and as a CEO you have to be prepared to say, “you know, you may have a point.”
In this instance, however, I’m sure that I’m absolutely in the right. I don’t care what my fellow board members and marketing department say. They’re wrong, I’m right.
There is absolutely no way I should be sitting here writing a blog about winning an Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Blowing my own trumpet
It’s really good to get it out there, they say. Read the citation. It talks about our passion for innovative technologies, pioneering new approaches, how we help marketing departments operate more efficiently. We can’t bury that under the carpet.
No, I tell them. It sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet, and people don’t like that. And we should listen to the people.
Then I get the long faces. Can’t you just slip it in somewhere – mention it in passing?
How do you mention something like that in passing? Spent a joyous weekend painting the shed and polishing my Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
But it’s not about you. It’s the company, the people who work with you. Think how good they feel knowing that Inspired Thinking Group’s achievements are being recognised.
And there they have me a little bit. That damned new angle. Because they’re right, of course. The nice people who award these things like to pick out individuals, as if everything good about a company comes from one person.
Entrepreneur of the Year award
But every CEO knows that’s not the case. Yes, you can set the course of the ship, but without top quality engineers stoking the engines, skilled navigators adjusting the course to steer you through the turbulence, and team players across the vessel striving in a common cause, no amount of good ideas are going to come to anything. Enterprise doesn’t stand alone.
So the truth is, the people who work for ITG have just won me an Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and publicly thanking them for all their hard work and dedication does, after all, seem a pretty reasonable topic for a blog.
Until next time…
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein
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Simon Ward discusses partnership with boutique retail agency, Vitamin.
Giving retailers a boost
Some of our biggest retailers are facing major challenges: the prevalence of no-frills, lowest-price-focused competitors; the increase in online purchases from retailers with lower overheads, and often more favourable tax regimes; and from innovations in marketing technology, whether it’s more interactive digital POS or the rapidly changing advertising environment.
These challenges permeate from the marketing department to the shop floor, and creating a joined-up strategy to tackle them all in a coherent manner involves input not only from marketing and the Board, but from multiple departments. And as many businesses operate in silos, each packed with people who are busily firefighting their own challenges, it’s no wonder some retailers are struggling to manage change.
As a marketing support company with a range of subject matter experts to call on, we have often stepped in to help our retail clients. It can be helpful to consult with someone not charged with tackling business-as-usual, who can step back and look at specific problems with a clear perspective.
Nevertheless, the challenges have now become so great that you now have to provide experts who are not just at the top of their game in one or two related disciplines, but across every aspect of retail marketing. Unless they have the experience and expertise to see the whole picture, they’re not going to be able to tackle the massive challenges that might be afflicting the company.
So what to do? Even an agency of our size and expertise would struggle to independently grasp every issue. We could put in large teams of experts in different fields, of course, but that’s a big resource to commit – and to charge for – so to tackle this problem, we decided the best course would be to seek out someone who has a proven track record across every aspect of retail marketing, and who is canny enough to be able to see all problems, great or small, and advise on how to tackle them.
But where do you find such a person?
We were lucky. We found two. I had met Natalie Somerville and Claire Roshanzamir before, and was extremely impressed. They have impeccable pedigrees in retail marketing, but from the inside. They have worked in senior positions at several big-name retailers. They met when working for Tesco, where Natalie was head of group brand and Claire head of communication planning.
Fortune, it seems, was shining on me. Both had recently left the client environment to set up their own boutique retail agency, Vitamin. Dissatisfied with some of the retail agencies they had employed in the past, where often theoretical marketing ideas rule over true, in-the-mud experience, they decided they would bring all their wide experience to bear in helping other retailers through these difficult times.
I immediately saw a synergy between Vitamin and ITG. As a boutique agency, they can concentrate more of their time on their core roles than they might if I offered to bring them into the company. Instead, by buying into Vitamin, I was able to offer them the substantial backing of a large studio and multichannel subject matter experts, as well as our technology proposal, buying power and financial expertise.
They in turn have taken our already impressive retail marketing offering to an even higher level. We now have a much-strengthened, more strategic team, which can advise and guide our clients across all retail marketing disciplines, processes and the latest in executional innovation. And in a rapidly changing retail environment, that’s a good team to have.
Until next time…
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.