News
-
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.
-
This week, I’ve welcomed aboard a recruitment manager at ITG – our first person wholly dedicated to this task. In the past, recruitment has been handled by individual department heads in consultation with HR.
There was nothing wrong with this system, but we’ve experienced such strong growth in the recent past that I felt we needed a dedicated resource to handle it.
In the past six months, we’ve taken on another 91 employees, while we’ve also bought an eCRM company, ITG Creator, which gave us an additional 125 staff (and growing).
Increasing automation
We now employ over 530 people – and are growing fast. The reason is that we appear to be reaching the tipping point when it comes to marketing automation.
Marketing departments have been talking about it for years – and many have dabbled with asset management software or otherwise dipped their toe in the digital ocean.
More pioneering companies have embraced it wholeheartedly, including of course many of our long-term clients, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Puma, Heineken and Renault.
The reason is simple – the marketing landscape is getting just too complex to manage with manual processes such as Excel and emails.
Advantages of MRM
Marketing automation not only increases the speed and efficiency of your activity, it gives you full visibility of your operation, making you more agile and helping inform future marketing plans.
It also joins up different areas of your operation, including artwork creation, asset management, campaign planning and stock management. All of these are easily handled through our Media Centre MRM platform.
But because we don’t just sell software ¬– we provide a full range of marketing support services, including artwork creation, print management and strategic and creative strategy – every new client means a new account team.
Hence the need for a dedicated recruitment manager to seek out the best people possible to fill these teams. It doesn’t matter how good your technology, or how extensive your services, if you don’t have people with the right knowledge (and above all, the right passion for customer service), you’re not going to give your clients the level of service they deserve.
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
Let your staff grow
Delegation is hard. As a CEO, you love your business – you care about every department, every person and every client. You probably even concern yourself with whether the paper’s GSM should be re-evaluated, or whether that picture in reception should be moved slightly to the left.
Delegation is hard, but it’s also very important. If you have the right people, in the right department, doing the jobs they’re best at, you’ll be free to concentrate on your most important role – making sure your business continues to succeed and is prepared for the future.
I recently promoted two of ITG’s directors to managing directors of customer service – a job I had been juggling myself. They are both highly motivated, passionate people with talent and acumen to burn.
Chris Heath, a director at ITG since it formed in 2009, worked alongside me as client services director at SP Group. Lisa Elrod joined us as customer service director in February 2013, after 14 years as client director at print and marketing specialist Bezier.
Now that Chris and Lisa are overseeing the delivery of customer service to our many prestigious clients, not only do they have the opportunity to further fulfil their potential, but those many prestigious clients are guaranteed the absolute attention they deserve.
If you want your company to grow, your staff needs to grow with it. ITG has experienced phenomenal expansion since its formation six years ago, last year entering the Sunday Times Tech Track 100, which recognises the UK tech companies with the fastest growing sales. These new appointments have given me the freedom to focus on further growth and strategic acquisitions, including overseeing the significant expansion of our US operation.
Retaining a strong engagement and relationship with our clients is key for ITG, as listening and adapting to their wants, needs and direction has been the driving factor in our growth and success as a service business. The promotion of Chris and Lisa has ensured this remains our key consideration at all times, and it has provided an improved structure for the scale of business we have become.
The professional landscape is always changing, shifting, propelling forward; and to ensure you’re in the right shape to navigate the ever-unpredictable road ahead, you need to make sure your business is in the right shape to drive forward and keep ahead of the pack.
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.
-
Engineering your supply chain
I’m extremely pleased to announce that Inspired Thinking Group has been appointed to manage the print procurement of shopping centre manager and owner, intu. We manage all the print for a lot of big companies now, and if it’s not too immodest to say so, we do it rather well.
There’s no magic to it, of course (although employing a team of top-notch print experts is a good starting point), but to mark this new partnership with intu, I thought it might be a good idea to share one or two pointers on how to get the best from your print supply chain.
This is one the biggest bugbears facing marketers today. When you have to produce hundreds of thousands of posters, leaflets and the panoply of POS, the last thing you have time for is selecting the best possible printer for every job.
Instead, the temptation is to fall back on the one or two tried-and-tested suppliers you’ve worked with for years: they know your products after all, and they’ve pushed out the boat on a number of occasions to get the job done, and well… you probably feel a bit disloyal looking at other options.
Loyalty is a good thing. You want good relations with your suppliers. Not only is it good for business, but we’re all human. Much more satisfying to run a successful business and be nice to your suppliers. I’ll return to the topic of loyalty at the end of this blog.
At the same time, one of your favourite printers might be excellent at one kind of work, but not be properly set up for another. Out there, there’s probably another printer who has the exact equipment you need for that specific job, and who can turn it around more quickly, at a higher quality and a better price.
When you’re spending millions on print, even a slight re-engineering of your supply chain can shave a significant slice off your marketing budget. And that’s where we come in.
The first factor in our success is an incredibly well-engineered supply chain. We don’t own any printers, which means we don’t have to give work to our own people just to keep the presses busy. Instead, we audit printers in our supply chain thoroughly and regularly, advising them on how to upgrade their equipment and practices to make them more competitive. At the same time, we get to know exactly what kinds of job they are best at, and which they aren’t.
This means that when any job comes in, we immediately know the four or five printers who will provide the highest quality work and turn the job around in the required time. Now comes the second factor: competitive tension.
We cherry-pick the four or five best printers for each job and send them an RFQ (request for quote). This is a completely automated process run through our Media Centre platform, so we always have a record of every quote we’ve ever received for every kind of job.
When the selected printers supply their quote, we can choose the best price, knowing full well that we’ve not only scored on quality, turnaround time and suitability, we’re also paying the lowest price for the job (the amount of work we can place generally guarantees a highly competitive quote).
Over hundreds, or even thousands of jobs, these relatively small cost saving can amount to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pounds – far more than it costs for the dedicated account managers we install alongside your marketing department to take the print burden off you.
And there’s another bonus too (I said I’d come back to loyalty). If you feel a bit bad about moving work from your favoured suppliers to a new, efficiently engineered supply chain, we have an answer for that too.
Often, these legacy printers need upskilling and uptooling to get them up to scratch. We frequently help with that process, advising them how to step up to the level required to join our roster of approved printers. In the long run, they may even get more work for our other clients than the work they lose from you.
It’s not often in business that everyone can be a winner, but it’s very satisfying when it happens.
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.