Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Michael, I'm not clear on what you're asking. Can you explain what "an all inclusive marketing messaging framework" might be? It sounds really fancy. What is it you need, and what are you going to use it for? (If I'm the only one in the dark, feel free to ignore this message.)

Michael,

what exactly do you want to do with this - integrated marketing messaging framework. Please check salesforce.com - I do not know whether this is what you are looking for but at least I believe is a good place to start with.

Michael

No disrespect intended, but...

Your question sounds like it's been generated with a "buzz phrase generator". I'm guessing this is either a college or business assignment, or that it's been dropped on your desk and you need urgent answers fast - but I bet the person who asked you has no idea what they meant, either.

It's essentially jargon/gobbledygook. Let's examine each piece in isolation:

Integrated or all inclusive

Simply means a comprehensive system embodying a number of different styles or elements. Might mean a combined online/offline approach with web. E-mail, TV, Radio, Print, Direct mail, PR, editorial, outdoor, instore presence and other promotional elements all combining to produce a product more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Marketing messaging framework

This could mean – simply – Advertising or some other form of promotional activity that gets the message “out there”.

For the B2B/E2E market

OK, B2B is widely used, in it’s generally accepted sense it means business to business, as distinct from Business to consumer, or government. But E2E is not as widely used and a search reveals a number of different potential connotations: Could you please clarify which of the many applications/interpretations of E2E you mean., e.g.

- End to End?
- Enterprise to Enterprise?
- Education to Employment?
- ...etc?

Detailing elements, variables and dependencies?

This means someone wants to know all the ingredients in the mix, how they might be varied in terms of quantity, cost, vale, metrics, placement, etc, and how they bond or work together.

SUMMARY

Again, no disrespect intended, but a person who asks you a question like this probably doesn’t know what they mean and maybe doesn’t know what they are doing. They are possibly hoping to impress by sounding very grandiose, which is the antithesis of effective marketing.

I doubt any marketing problem will ever be solved by an integrated or all inclusive marketing messaging framework for the B2B/E2E market containing detailed elements, variables and dependencies.

Why? Because at its most effective, marketing is simple and clear.

It has to be, to cut through.

People don’t have time or emotional bandwidth to absorb a very complicated message through multiple pathways.

How we can REALLY help you?

I think the community here may be able to help you far more if you could explain the problem you need to solve, and what you’ve tried so far, and how those ideas have worked.

All the best

Chris Blackman

Dear Michael

From 15 years CRM, ERP, Forecasting, Analysis and Management of Sales, and Marketing I can assure you that what you are seeking, or perhaps moreover the way you are seeking it is a guarantee of disappointment.

Back in the 1990’s CRM earned a very bad name for itself precisely by allowing well funded customers to choose from a Smorgasbord of features in expensive packages such as Siebel, Oracle, SAP and so on which, if appropriately configured would do “anything” wanted of them including turning off the lights after the last frustrated would-be user had resigned. In the UK alone, we had over 100 examples of £20M plus roll outs which ended up becoming rather expensive on-line address books.

Now, before you switch me off as “Yet another person who doesn’t understand you” (I don’t, from what you have written, no-one could) we sell a software package which will probably do what you are looking for. It’s called SymVolli. OK, then it’s up to me to say what it does and how it does it, right?

I’m afraid that if that were the case then potential customers would flock to our doors, orders in hand, from just reading the blurb on the website (see my biography for details) and I could go and buy a new Bentley. It doesn’t work like that because what it does and how it does it is unique to each and every customer and to expect a customer, whose expertise lies in their own business, to extrapolate their own company benefits from a description of capabilities or features is a bit like asking someone to read programming code without annotations and derive the intent of the programme.

Our starting point is for a customer to describe their business to us. Then we fix on a few “Pain Points” or things which manifestly don’t work at the moment and haul them, usually struggling, to define the processes they think that they employ, along with their intended purpose. Once we’ve done that, we have, in the customer’s own words an overview description of the sales and marketing aspects of the business they actually run, rather than the business they think that they run. It requires a degree of honesty which is hard to extract until a relationship has been established, and simple sounding things, like the sales forecast (On which everything else often hangs) are subjects which come closest to provoking a bout of fisticuffs in the boardroom that I have ever seen.

For the sake of the record, you focus on understanding and presumable synchronising the marketing cycle with your sales cycle and your customer’s buying cycle. Thos is probably one of the poorest understood areas of business today, especially if you are not engaged in Operational Research to align these processes. Unilever does precisely that and goes for a spot of process optimisation at the same time. To achieve this it employs a team of about 200 PhD mathematicians to support its OR efforts and has a budget of about £200Million. That said, it drives profit improvements in the region of £1.8Billion through delivering along these areas and also in logistics.

Your starting point should be to define your operation in much more detail. To avoid you having to spend 300 pages doing this (And wasting 270 of those pages of work) you need to be guided by someone asking you the relevant questions and getting you to define the structures and systems which are implicated. I’d be pleased to help, and if you want, I’ll do it on the forum so that all can join in, but my experience tells me that your answers to such questions, if accurate, should remain confidential.

Do contact us – our solution might well not be for you, but at least we can start you on the right direction, rather than launch you into the darkness!

Steve Alker
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