Core concepts

MM: Let’s shift now into the conversation and hopefully extended discussion of digital supply chains and how they parallel to a high degree physical supply chains. Would you just give us a quick reprise of the core concepts or the core ideas of a supply chain? Then start to correlate that to digital and physical versions?

First, supply chains start with the idea that there are multiple business entities or operations that are part of an end-to-end process of transforming raw materials or IP into some sort of tangible good or service at the end, that a consumer ends up buying.

MB: Part of the complexity of managing a supply chain is that the number of these parties is not small.

If you are a company that buys things from two other companies, you do not have a big and complex supply-chain problem.

But many companies buy many thousand items from a large number of suppliers and in turn sell to hundreds or thousands of customers—these companies have very complex planning and execution issues and can benefit from new analytic tools.

Beyond analytics, collaboration with your supply chain partners, sharing of information and allowing views by your suppliers into the inventory levels of their products in your facilities, or views by your customers into the status of your shipments to them, can dramatically reduce your joint costs, improve product availability and increase customer service.

Web-based access to these analytics and collaboration applications by supply chain partners is a big advantage of SaaS solutions.

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PvT: Which marketing solution providers are top-of-mind for you? And why? Again, that’s a broad question, but considering some of the challenges that you’ve just mentioned, can you think of solution providers that address customer engagement?

MM: Well, I have the delectable challenge that many of the vendors—technology OEMs, ISVs, marketing service providers, and solution integrators in the DAM, MOM, and related publishing technology markets, are my clients. So I am little biased towards my clients!

Now, that all said, I’m also a category champion: My job is to cheer, lead, and create energy around the next big opportunity; energize and bring new companies into the larger category of DAM, marketing operations, engagement platforms, and open-innovation processes.

That all said, I’m a little bit like a mother with a whole bunch of children. You know, mom loves all of her children. Now she might love one more than the other, but she never says. It’s really important that all of her children feel loved.

PvT: Yep.

MM: Now, so I’m not gonna be namin’ names; however, I can outline some general attributes of the leading vendor or ‘gorilla’. Probably first and foremost is that they have an integration strategy that links explicitly or implicitly to the customer-making process. So they’ve got technologies and capabilities related to pre-sales and post-sales across the customer-making lifecycle. Boom, one.

Two, that they understand that fundamentally the Web does not constitute a channel but a business eco-system. And an eco-system requires a business strategy that anticipates and rewards contributions to the ultimate end-user customer from third and fourth parties. So a business eco-system strategy really comes down to how well you understand the needs of business partners; not just strategic business partners, but perhaps most critically independent consultants and small niche boutique solution providers – 3, 4, or 5 person firms.

The third thing that really distinguishes the real gorilla or market leader is the company that really understands that purchase of its technology represents barely 10 percent of the overall commitment and value that you bring to the customer; that really is about a structured service fulfillment methodology in the spirit of satisfaction assurance. That really is an agreement by and between the vendor and the customer to build or to facilitate the customer developing or building new operational capabilities within the firm.

So that you bought my stuff and make it shelfware is unacceptable. I’m not gonna let myself off the hook until you’ve bought my stuff, you’ve deployed it, you’ve undergone all of the change management and disruption-mitigation processes, and that fundamentally you’ve created new accountabilities around the care and feeding of my technology, and that you’re now using my technology to drive strategic growth. Top line growth, be it with existing customers, or incremental business in new markets with new customers, and that I’m generating sufficient profit to offset the investment that you made in not just my technology but in my service fulfillment methodology.

Those are the 3 hallmarks, if you will, of the vendor who will succeed in this marketplace.

PvT: Fantastic. A very comprehensive answer!

How does the customer benefit?

MM: Cool! Love doing it. You know, I’d like to expand on what we just discussed, emphasizing the levels of good, better, and best—or the simple, moderate and, you know, the Mercedes version—of DAM as business strategy in global marketing operations.

PvT: Okay.

MM: Let me start by saying that enterprise DAM supports a marketing supply-chain strategy for sourcing marketing content as well as an expanding array of services for engaging customers throughout a life cycle.

PvT: Okay.

MM: Next, let’s address how firm innovate new processes within the marketing operations. I put that under the rubric of bottom-up innovation in global marketing operations. This perspective reflects some of our most current work: how companies innovate new processes using small executive peer-workgroups to create 15-day project plans that single person or small group can execute with existing resources and constraints. Specifically, this emphasizes the creation of a master project roadmap for driving innovation into operational capability.

Third, and the one that directly relates to our new white paper on operational capabilities for managing engaging customers for across an entire lifecycle.

So it would be kind of a über roadmap for how all these technologies integrate to a customer-making process model, the various integration points of these various technologies and disciplines, what are the things that you should do now, next, or later, and specifically answering one question over, and over again: How does the customer benefit?

You know, hey, this is a really cool social media technology…uh, how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new analytic tool…oy, how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new web content managr…yes, but how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new email system…how does the customer benefit?

So that’s my mantra, that’s the organizing principle, how does the customer benefit with very specific proposals from the vendor community?

And, of course, that requires that you have an integration mindset, a customer-making process model, and an innovation-services platform by which to accommodate and integrate these new technologies to new or enhanced operational capabilities.

Finally, DAM becomes integral with that innovation-services platform. In fact, digital asset management with its extreme emphasis on process and procedure for ensuring the integrity of metadata, media, and user experience (findability, usability of what you found, and permissions to do what you need to do with what your found) enables a firm to reengineer its processes of creating content and interactive services.

SOA Value Chains?

PvT: Who are the prime contributors to the development and support of an operational marketing and service innovation platform? And how did you start researching the technical ecosystem—what you and I now call engagement marketspace?

We started in 1995 with digital asset management and content management because no matter what else came along, you must have a media and content under management.

In 2000, we started investigating another class of vendors in the marketing automation, MRM, and marketing operations management space. Some of the vendors have make great progress.

With rare exception, they all still need to better understand DAM and, more the point, metadata management—a database and DBA for logging and tracking enterprise metadata as instantiated in all enterprise databases, including ERP and CRM, as a strategic asset.

Since 2004, we have tracked vendors that come from the CRM, business intelligence, and process analytics space.

For the last three or so years, we have tried to understand firms in marketing service provider and data enrichment vendors—lots to cover!

Of course there are whole sets of vendors in dynamic messaging and email management content space, and in the customer experience management space too/

As I stated before, there’s many different technology vectors in the marketing and innovation value chain, that ultimately support the idea of an innovation-services platform.

This calls attention to, however, the critical need for leadership within marketing to have a services integration framework and an underlying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabling this integration framework. IBM does some great work there with its component business models—what I call CIO blueprints.

Services integration

However, the senior marketing executive, not the CIO, must commission and own the services integration framework—it basically specifies in one wall-mounted poster all of the services – marketing and innovation-related services – of the business eco-system from which the firm will build, buy, or rent technology or engagement services over the next five years.

Now, the CIO blueprint represent an living, evolving visual depiction of one thing: how firm intends provision services needed attracting, serving, and keeping profitable customers for life.

The CIO blueprint also makes explicit how the firm intends to marshal the resources of a global business eco-system: ‘Here’s what we bring to the customer experience. Here’s what our partners bring, and here’s how it all integrate to an end-to-end process of customer-making.

PvT: I guess that repositions marketing automation a bit player in a larger play?

MM: Well, I don’t think that the rubric of marketing automation delivers useful distinction anymore. I don’t like the term “marketing automation” because many of the research firms and vendors have abused the term, rendering it useless.

Rather, I would like to speak about marketing in terms of process maturities, and levels of process maturity for a marketing operation.

Again, the senior executive doesn’t really care about technology or marketing automation, per se, he or she is most concerned with operational capabilities and building or enhancing capabilities which will related directly to a process maturity model for marketing operation.

However, this all underscores a very strategic point: business rules and metadata enable orchestration of the technologies and processes of how firms attract, serve, and keep customers for life. Very, very few technology vendors deliver solutions for orchestrating the customer engagement life cycle. Typically, the missed or underplay the role of three SOA capabilities: digital asset management, metadata management, and marketing claims management.

Marketing claims management

This last one, marketing claims management, entails a end-to-end workflow for developing and publishing approved copywritten material—product or service claims—to a specialize XML database publishing system. I use the term broadly to include anything written, formatted, and published in printed collateral, business communications, web sites, interactive detailing or presentation systems, catalogs, microsites, newsletters, etc.

In my view of the world, marketing claims management represents a subsystem of DAM and metadata management—that in turn represent subsystems of master data management.

And all of which requires a IT governance scheme—systems, processes, and accountabilities for researching, acquiring or developing, deploying, provisioning, managing, and retiring the technologies used to attract, serve, and keep customers for life!

Key point: tomorrow’s CMOs are mid-level IT executives today getting their masters in Business Administration or Media Psychology.

PvT: Okay. What regional considerations must firms accommodate in their global marketing strategy?

MM: Sure. Let’s start by breaking localization into four geographic mental maps.

First, we have what many call pan-regional marketing area. For example, this typically includes Asia Pacific (also called APAC) or in some cases Indo-Pacific where the mental map falls along the lines of English-speaking areas (which would include India, Australia, and New Zealand) And, EMEA—Europe, Middle East, and Africa as well as Latin America (although my Brazilian clients remind me that Brazilians do not consider themselves as Latin Americans!)

In each of those areas, a global marketing organization has to localize the marketing material, both print and online, across dozens of languages and currencies.

There’s a whole new business eco-system that has begun to emerge around facilitating or driving pan-regional localization of marketing content, as well as services related to the pre-sales and post-sales interactions with customers.

Then, the second geographic mental map address cultural markets with a more or less a unified language and currency, emphasizing the challenges how to maintain a global voice and cultural resonance. From an operational perspective, this emphasizes the integration of traditional and newer marketing processes.

So it’s, if you will, a global brand with local flavors. For example, many Americans make the mistake—I should say many North Americans—make the mistake of translating a piece of collateral or web content into German and consider their work done—that it will work well or good enough in Germany, the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, and Austria. In most cases, it does not work.

You don’t need more than 5 minutes in a conversation in the café in any one of those areas to understand that they are incredibly tribal, and they make hyper-acute discernments about haircuts, shoes, facial expressions, so as to establish you’re part of my tribe or you’re not part of my tribe.

What works in the Southern part of Germany doesn’t work in the Northern part of Germany, and it certainly doesn’t work in Switzerland, and it categorically won’t work in Austria; different metaphors, different visuals, different motifs, and different underlying narratives in terms of what it means to be a consumer and in a relationship with the brand and the tribe of brand users.

The third geographic mental map address mini markets within a country—I’ve already tipped my hand by saying micro-localization within a country.

So, for example, my work with clients in the Netherlands led me to discover the hyper-tribal nature of their local markets. I am astounded just in this tiny little country of the Netherlands, the Dutch remain fiercely tribal with respect to the very southern parts of the Netherlands, such a Einhoven, to the greater Amsterdam area, to the northern parts which are more Flemish as opposed to the more French folks in the southern parts. The Dutch make very, very sharp distinctions about, again, haircuts, clothing styles, inflected speech, manners of metaphors, key words and phrases, that all mark out, oh, you’re not one of us; oh, you are one of us.

Neo-tribalism

You know, Marshall McLuhan was right. All this technology of electronic media cools us down, making us very primal and triabal—what he even called Neo-tribalism. Wow, if he could have only seen instant messaging, SMS, and social networking in action, he would smile with great satisfaction of having understood the root sociology of the Networked Age.

As this relates to marketing, it means that marketing has to become much more tribal too–much more specific to the subcultures and niches within an otherwise unified market.

And finally, we come to the fourth geographic mental map of localization.

It has to do with the newer developments of mass customization, shopper marketing, and remix culture.

Shopper marketing drives the idea of segmentation into the floor plans of individual retailers and shopping malls, specifically drawing upon the very rich practice of database marketing and database analytics.

Shopper marketing takes that same analytic principles to the actual physical footprint of each retail store, specifically asking the question, ‘Who are my most profitable customers?’ and ‘How can we stage products micro-theaters, or ‘design moments’ in interior design-speak that engage with very specific shopper demographics.

Say, for example, a married woman with 3 or more children. Single dad with 1 or 2 kids. Divorced or bachelor male, late 40s. And when these individual demographic or psychographic segments walk into a store, they have certain core needs that you could think of as the basic staples. Then around those staples, shopper marketing details higher margin impulse items that we know appeals to that particular shopper demographic. Imagine that these little stages track to particular local high school or college sporting events.

I see this Whole Foods and WalMart—at both ends of the competitive spectrum.

So as a global brand marketer, you must have brand architecture and promotional content that express the basic narratives and core values of the brand while providing enough flexibility, within a robust framework, that will work at the pan-regional, cultural, in-country, and shopper-marketing levels.

So localization now means getting it right down into the individual store.

For marketing organizations, this means that they must specify and source content in ‘liquid’ form. They must have content that various staffers and partners can mix and match into very unique expressions right down to an individual store kiosk, or a trade show booth, or a direct mail piece like a catalog, and so on.

Professional background

MM: Let’s start with an introduction.

MB: My name is Mike Beckerle. Let me explain a little bit about my background. I joined in January of 2008. As the CTO, I’m responsible for product development of new products and technologies and the strategic direction for existing products.

I joined Oco from IBM, where I was involved in large-scale computing. The core of my experience comes from spending much of my career in developing large-scale parallel processing for commercial data processing workloads. The result of this work is now the core part of the IBM information server product. I was responsible for much of the scalability of that product.

I joined Oco because it was a very good fit with my background, and my experience is very relevant to Oco’s strategic direction. For example, during the dot-com era, I was involved in “SaaS,” at a startup called Fact City, although it wasn’t called that at the time. We did something that was fundamentally SaaS and quite similar to Oco’s solution in taking data in disparate forms and using it to construct a high-volume Web-accessed data service.

I decided that putting scalable commercial data processing and SaaS together would provide a great value proposition for the marketplace. I was thinking about launching this type of solution, and discovered that there was already a company doing it — Oco.