Archives

Enabling Truly Agile Marketing
We’ve known for a while that agile marketing – continuously developing and refining your marketing activity to improve your response to unfolding events and customer activity – can increase speed to market and foster more effective customer engagement than relying on those rigid old long-term marketing plans.

But to be truly agile, you need adequate data – from measuring the efficiency of your marketing operation to assessing customer sentiment and the effectiveness of your engagement across all digital and social channels. Knowledge really is power.

The problem most marketers face is not lack of data – every aspect of your digital activity generates reams of real-time information – but the ability to glue together these data feeds and interpret the information in a rapid and meaningful way.

That’s why we introduced Status. Status is our data visualisation and analysis tool, which complements our Media Centre MRM platform. It takes real-time data from all your marketing activity and presents it in an easy-to-read-and-interpret series of dashboards.

Instant insights

The faster you can access these insights, the more quickly you can assess what is working and use this intelligence to increase marketing performance, engagement and – what ultimately interests us all – sales.

Agile marketing often breaks down when information is either not shared by different teams due to siloed ways of working, or when third-party agencies retain the data. It also fails when your technology spits out information that other platforms can’t read.

Status solves these problems through being platform-agnostic. It can pull in data from marketing platforms such as our Media Centre, as well as numerous other sources, including Twitter, Facebook, SAP, Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Campaign Monitor.

It can combine marketing data with sales data, production, delivery and stock information, and financial and budgetary data, giving you total visibility of your entire operation.

Improved ROI

As a cloud-based app, Status enables you to view your real-time data on any desktop or mobile device. You can view broad overviews of activity or drill down to a granular level of information on any area of your operation.

Not only does Status provide valuable real-time insights, it helps you measure your return on investment by showing the impact of your campaigns on sales. You can see which channels work best at driving specific engagement, while the agility and insights it provides gives you more time to plan more effective campaign strategies.

But best of all, it’s easy to understand and navigate – you don’t need an IT degree to interpret the data and develop meaningful strategies. We supply it with expert training and setup, and ongoing development and support.

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.
Continue Reading...
Focusing on Recruitment
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.
Continue Reading...
When Marketers are not Marketers
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.
Continue Reading...
Making Local Marketing Work
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.
Continue Reading...
A day is a long time in technology
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.
Continue Reading...
Simon Ward: Operating a 24-hour artwork studio
A little over twelve months ago, we were pleased to welcome Heineken as a client. One of the most celebrated brands in the world, the prestigious Dutch brewer runs marketing campaigns across the globe, and Inspired Thinking Group (ITG) was tasked with adapting its below-the-line assets for 178 nations.

Our specialism in local marketing – tailoring national campaigns and assets for often hundreds of individual outlets – was a perfect fit for Heineken. And ITG had the opportunity to demonstrate that oceans and continents, languages and cultures, were no barrier to successful localisation.

Round-the-clock services

But there is another aspect of our business that would benefit our new partner. Our artwork and packaging studio operates 24/7. We are, as it were, ‘always on’ (find out more about Inspired Thinking Group’s studio)

This has proved extremely popular with our UK clients. They know if the work is urgent, they can send us a brief in the afternoon and receive the artwork the following morning – all managed effortlessly through our cloud-based Media Centre platform.

But one chap’s morning is another chap’s evening, and when you’re a company that’s rapidly expanding its services around the globe, you can hardly down tools at 5.30pm Greenwich Mean Time and expect to prosper in a world that never sleeps.

Quality artwork

To speed of content creation and global convenience, add quality. Most mistakes are made when people rush. If you’re scrambling to finish that poster or packaging design before the whistle blows, that’s when the ball gets dropped.

But when there’s another team you can pass the ball on to, the scrambling ceases and calm professionalism prevails. 24/7.

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
Continue Reading...
Why do companies rebrand?
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…

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
Continue Reading...
Ensuring your agencies deliver quality
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…

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.
Continue Reading...
Only one of the letters in ‘enterprise’ is an ‘i’
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…

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
Continue Reading...
Inspired Thinking Group (ITG) partner with marketing agency Vitamin
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…

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.
Continue Reading...