Joining Forces - Special Report - IT & Marketing

By Patrick Gray

Published: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 MIS Magazine (Financial Review)

They were once strange bedfellows, but now techies and marketers are becoming a hot item, Patrick Gray discovers


Marketing can be as baffling to IT professionals as technology is to marketing experts. Let's face it, these two industries have been engaged in a battle for jargon supremacy for years.

While our dear chief information officers get excited about end-to-end solutions, service-oriented architecture, web services, converged communications and storage-area networks, marketing managers have a lingo all their own: repertory-grid method, Porter's five forces and face validity to name a few of the most confusing expressions.

However, these two fields are merging. Marketing, whether driven by telephone, email, web or through advertising, is increasingly a technology-dependent discipline. The affect that is having on organisational structures is becoming clearer: marketing and technology have to spend more time understanding and working with each other.

Food giant Nestlé Australia takes its marketing seriously. Mass marketing drives its business, so managing its brand and marketing assets effectively and uniformly is a must. Now, in the middle of a marketing resource management (MRM) upgrade, Nelson Leong, Nestlé Australia's visual identity manager, describes how technology enables his team to do its job.

"In terms of marketing, we have tonnes and tonnes of data. Research about consumer insights, the state of the market, information about the media, information about the material that you need to put on to the media, be it television, radio, print, press or packaging and design collateral. That's a hell of a lot of communications assets," Leong told MIS.

He says MRM is a digital way of managing the work flow and the data through its capture, for example, image libraries and storage systems, and then looking at decomposing the work-flow process that happens within a marketing unit and speeding up the process.

Combine this with analytics that tell marketers how long jobs have taken, whether stakeholders have engaged properly, whether all stakeholders have approved the correct processes in a timely manner, and the ability to correct glitches in work flow, and you have a system that makes life much easier for marketers. However, Leong doesn't regard the implementation of the system as a technology project: it's driven by the business, for the business. While IT plays a supporting role, the marketing boffins determine the project's scope and direction.

"It's not a technology project. The technology side is quite discreet. It's in the background. What makes it usable and invaluable to the users is it's referenced to them in their language and according to their methodologies. It needs to feel familiar to them and it has to be written in their terms and in ways that they understand it. Not just out of this office, but globally," he says.

It was Nestlé's e-business group, which has a foot in both camps, that seeded the initiative. "They're the ones who drove the project and presented at a board level and convinced the organisations to acquire," Leong says.

The company will deploy software from MRM vendor Aprimo. Analysis and research firm Gartner says MRM is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16 per cent, and forecasts "rapid" growth in the technology's uptake over the next five years.

The success of Nestlé's e-business group in spanning multiple disciplines suggests ties between technology and marketing disciplines will only deepen in the future, Leong says.

"[There are] differences between merely having a web presence and an e-business strategy. E-business strategy is quite deep, it's thorough, it goes to the very heart of an organisation," he says.

If anything, marketers and IT heads are even starting to tread on each others' toes, with positive results for business. Marketing groups within Nestlé have previously approached the technology group to ask it to develop a tool, Leong says, only to find out it was already in the works.

Like Nestlé, Virgin Blue has an e-commerce group that straddles technology and marketing. Formal contact with the marketing area comes via a dedicated IT account manager who works across sales, marketing and the company's Velocity reward program.

It's important to keep the communication lines open, says David Harvey, the airline's general manager of IT.

The technology group also keeps an eye on technical resources various areas of the business seek to access.

For example, one part of the business may want to extract large volumes of data from the airline's reservations database, which isn't a problem, unless there's a cheap fare sale on.

"We're doing a big sale and people might want to draw data for mining. We have a team that looks after the reservations platform and they know who in the business is likely to be the big users," he says.

Virgin Blue's technology and marketing agenda consists of developing a customer relationship management strategy.

"We're trying to understand the value proposition of an integrated CRM solution as opposed to putting in lots of point solutions," Harvey says.

"There are more business questions in this than technology questions. Who owns the customer? Who co-ordinates contact with the customer? They're all business questions."

Using point solutions has its appeal, Harvey says, but the business may then end up with a disparate view of the customers spread across applications and databases. The key driver is to get a single view of customers so they can do any segmentation of the individual customer to find out specific information and then align communication to that customer between the groups.

A fragmented CRM deployment could wreak havoc on Virgin Blue's customers due to the disconnect between its marketing department and its Velocity frequent flyer program. It's a scenario Harvey is keen to avoid. However, the introduction of complicated, unified CRM comes with its own pitfalls, so options must be carefully weighed.

"If it's split off, you can have Velocity communicating one thing at one time and marketing doing something else at the same time and, at the end of the day, the poor customer is sitting there getting swamped by emails," he says.

"CRM solutions aren't cheap and aren't easy to implement. So we're going through that rigour at the moment of just how much we can bite off. What's our business ready for?"

Over at Nestlé, Leong says the marketing department has a dedicated CRM expert on staff.

"They developed a policy approach, put a proposal forward to the heads of marketing and said, 'this is what we think we can achieve, this is the objective, here's how we build the database and here's what the benefits of that database will be to you, and why and how we mine that information'," he says.

Chief of research Asia-Pacific for Gartner , John Roberts, says CRM and business intelligence will continue to play a vital role in marketing in 2007.

"Business intelligence is among the highest priorities for CIOs this year in our survey," Roberts says, adding now defunct experiments with data warehousing have helped hone technology.

"There was a great failure rate on data warehouses because it's very easy to put data in warehouses. Intelligently taking it out is a whole lot more difficult," he says.

"Then business intelligence came along with the smarter reporting tools and I think the maturity of business intelligence is only now starting to emerge in those organisations that really want it."

Business intelligence is now being driven from the top, Roberts explains, and the increasing savvy of business people in all disciplines means they're the ones determining technology-enabled strategy.

"It's being driven from a top-down perspective. The success factor is that it is very much driven by business management, be it marketing managers or whatever else," Roberts says. Tweaking the systemCustomer relationship management has turned out to be vital to West Australian-based charity Rocky Bay's marketing arm, and despite its lack of dedicated IT resources, the sky hasn't fallen in. As it turns out, users can handle running their own CRM these days.

The organisation, which receives government funding, provides care for children and young adults with neuromuscular disabilities. But government dollars only go so far, so Rocky Bay assembled a telemarketing group to sell raffle tickets.

"We're in marketing here," says telemarketing supervisor Julie-Ann Sugar. " The money that we raise here is vital to keep a number of our houses operational."

She estimates her group of 11 part-time telemarketers raises about $110,000 a year for Rocky Bay. It's not mega-dollars, but it helps, Sugar says. "For a little group, that's pretty good."

Over time, Rocky Bay's database has grown to host 200,000 records. Managing those contacts correctly is vital, not only to stay compliant with direct marketing regulations, but to make the best use of her team's time.

However, it's the management of Rocky Bay's Goldmine CRM system that's interesting. Sugar, who is by no means a technology expert, runs the whole system. "I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none," she says.

Despite her self-confessed lack of technical skills, it's Sugar's job to tweak the Goldmine system, implement new processes used by the call-centre staff, manage the database and generally oversee the operation of what has evolved into a sophisticated implementation.

"We've had to modify some of the processes, we're starting now to tweak it a bit more," she says.

Even a few years ago, sophisticated, process-driven CRM for call centres was the domain of technical experts. Yet Sugar is now capable of adding functionality to the system herself. "We do go through some hiccups every now and then, but you've just got to sit through it logically," she says.