 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
In 2005, over $4 billion of the world's marketing-communications spending was based on solutions derived from the Information Network Engram (INE), our patent-pending decision-making tool. The INE engine provides highly accurate marketing direction for technology brands across ten countries and 25 technologies, and tracks customer preferences for over 65 brands. Strategic Oxygen has invested multiple years and over $8 million into the development of the INE. We continue to perform ongoing analyses of the three phases of the purchase process—Awareness, Consideration and Purchase. Based on extensive research, we have established brand-normative data sets that cover the full range of inter-relationships between these three phases, including how long it takes to move a target from Awareness to Purchase, and what messages and/or what combination of sales-and-marketing vehicles are most effective in doing so. The INE tool translates these findings into actionable recommendations for today's top technology brands. CLIENTS: Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Strategic Oxygen serves clients in APEC, Europe and the Americas, across business-to-business and consumer-technology markets in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan, the PRC and a number of other developing and traditional markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and Mexico. Strategic Oxygen currently works with many of the world's leading technology companies—ranging from consumer and retail brands; to hardware, software and solutions-based providers; to key players in the major enterprise markets. With over 45 published white papers on topics like brand tracking, integrated marketing, improving brand performance and capitalizing on the INE tool, Strategic Oxygen is respected globally for helping brands produce measurable results. TEAM: Formed in 2000 by experts in technology marketing, Strategic Oxygen has rapidly grown into a leader in advanced, integrated, marketing planning and measurement. Michael Gale Mike Oliver Ollie Zimmermann George Minow For more information on Strategic Oxygen, email strategy@strategicoxygen.com. WHY CUSTOMER CENTRIC INTEGRATION MATTERS: Our $12M+ ongoing investment in marketing-effectiveness tracking has shown us that four core rules now apply to the outcomes of successful communications programs. 1. TARGETS HAVE MATURE PATTERNS—THAT DIFFER. All buyers—whether they are adult or youth, in the US or Beijing, buying complex solutions or simple commodity products—have pre-ordained methods for searching for, absorbing and evaluating information during the purchase process. The INE illustrates what those methods are, and how to best address them. The traditional marketing model has argued that the right combination of creative and share-of-voice is what drives successful marketing programs and/or campaigns. However, more-mature audience selection of medium types has altered this formula to, in fact, now show that the right mix of media, with the appropriate content and the correct sequencing is far more powerful in terms of impact. Paying attention to these patterns—as your brand chooses a mix of sales and marketing vehicles, develops content, and determines the best sequencing for each piece—can increase marketing ROI by 30 percent or more. Going where customers are going, talking about things they want to hear, seeing and touching them at the right time and sending them on to the next best destination is the way to move your brand forward. The INE illustrates over 350 unique combinations of marketing vehicles, content and sequencing that work for over 75 brands across 11 geographic regions. 2. WITHIN A BRAND, OPINIONS ABOUND. The nature of modern brands is that there are many chefs in the kitchen. One talks about product benefits, another focuses on brand strengths and yet another hones in on demand trends. Customers or prospects sit at the center of these debates—although sometimes they get lost on the outskirts. The first place to look for guidance when developing marketing plans is the customer's usage patterns for communications-and-sales vehicles. In other words, a customer-centric focus enables these multiple opinions to have a common language, so your brand can realize greater effectiveness in planning and execution. 3. INTEGRATION IS THE ONLY WAY TO GO. Of the tens of thousands of customers we have talked to—CXOs of Fortune 500 companies, CIOs, line of business managers, IT specialists, home consumers— less than twelve percent use just one source of information throughout the purchase process. There is no escaping the need to pull together various execution vehicles as part of the sales-and-marketing process. Isolating a marketing event from your ongoing print or online activities ignores the fact that at least 40 percent of key event attendees go online or to print after the event instead of to the typical email or direct-mail follow-up. Brands that are hyper-aggressive about integration are more likely to generate immediate net returns of 15 percent or more within the first quarter than brands that just loosely tie together each component. 4. ROI IS A FUNCTION OF CUSTOMER-CENTRIC INTEGRATION. From over 150 experiments with leading brands, we have seen that a 15-percent improvement in marketing performance can directly and positively affect company earning by as much as 25 percent. If you market to customers how and when they want you to (with the right vehicles, the right content and the correct frequency) you can significantly reduce wastage per dollar of spend. This approach also brings almost-immediate improvements to specific problem areas—like preference levels and conversion rates, not just awareness levels and image perceptions. The result? Real ROI. And what drives this? Using real customer guidance to shape marketing composition and marketing mixes. MARKET VIEW AND BRAND TRACKING: When evaluating Strategic Oxygen as a potential partner, it's critical to know our philosophy and market perspective—the defining factors that will sculpt the marketing investments we recommend. Here is an overview of our foundational principles: 1. The technology segment is an increasingly unique marketing environment, framed by complex decision-making processes and a diversified marketing landscape. As a result, technology brands must be extremely focused as they integrate marketing and targeting activities. This has a number of significant implications for brands, and increases the importance of measuring and correctly associating the actual behavior of sales targets (both organizations and individuals) with specific methods for impacting their behavior and attitudes (preferences and associations). 2. Customer-centric planning and customer-centric brand tracking are symbiotically linked. This is critical, as it is all too easy for apples-and-oranges comparisons to prevent appropriate sales-and-marketing choices. When planning a marketing initiative, it helps to know what results similar initiatives have had in the past. Otherwise, the actual needs of targets can become disconnected from all the planning variables (sales-and-marketing vehicles, cadence, content, etc.). 3. Significant brand development in the technology market has traditionally been driven by the combination of watershed events (ex/Y2K, Win95, Internet growth) with the brand's ability to link itself to that event (ex/Dell, Oracle, SAP). Today's more-mature markets, however, need more-mature growth models-based on clear value propositions that are closely attached to a brand's executional skills. Brand research needs to be sensitive to the layering of these attributes so that your marketing communications say things like, “Our userfriendly online portal makes it easy for you to get the help you need,” instead of broad-brush-stroke phrases like, “We're easy to do business with.” 4. Sales and marketing have to work together. For most brand categories of high value, the two are equal partners in the management of revenue and margin growth. Too frequently, however, measurement and planning tools ignore the explicit need of a brand's sales-and-marketing efforts to integrate. 5. Those who supply marketing intelligence within a brand must enable, not disable, change. It's critical that market-research and sales-effectiveness results are communicated to sales-and-marketing teammates in an interactive way that deals directly with execution. Simple slideware presentations are neither adequate nor interactive enough to foster the kind of buy-in necessary to alter marketing and sales behavior, and they can actually stop change in its tracks. Instead, using a layered, interactive presentation tools to communicate market intelligence to the entire team (from the marketing managers to the CMO) can generate internal dialogue and produce the right formula for change (participation + resource allocation = change). Measuring marketing results without using behavior models leads many brands to over- or under-react to changes. As a result, these brands tend to have wild swings in spending and marketing activity levels from quarter to quarter. By using the INE from Strategic Oxygen, your brand can accurately assess real marketing results, and intelligently plan for effective marketing initiatives. |
