“Our aim is simple. We want to improve the marketing output of every single organisation that engages us.”
For more than twenty years, our belief has been that solving the complex challenges our clients face requires evidence-based thinking combined with design-focused creativity. It means we challenge our clients, and ourselves, to continuously evolve in thought and approach to develop innovative solutions that provides a competitive advantage to our clients.
Marketing Management
There has never been a more exciting or challenging time to be in marketing. Marketers are finding themselves with less budget, fewer resources, greater demands for both short term results and long-term growth, and more options than ever before in a complex and uncertain market. It is definitely a challenge.
We work with our marketing clients to help them identify, optimise and organise the resources they have available. In evolving your marketing efforts, we have found it essential not just to consider your strategy and structure, but also to include organisational culture, capabilities and skills, and process to ensure a sustainable, high performance solution.
Our approach is two-fold – both quantitative and qualitative – for all aspects of assessing your current situation, comparing performance metrics, budget, resource allocations, capabilities and process against your strategic objectives. We then design and explore a range of solutions with you to develop and agree the right approach to deliver the desired results.
But because to every challenge there are always many opportunities, rather than simply making a single recommendation, we prefer to explore the options available and review these with you and your management team to find the bets fit solution for your particular circumstances and the your organisation. This means taking into consideration issues such as culture, disruption, risk and reward in determining collectively the best approach for you.
Discover more on our approach to this challenge here.
Advertising Management
Advertising is no longer simply advertising. Today, through the selection of appropriate media channels, the effect of advertising can be felt across the full range of the sales funnel and customer journey. To think of advertising as simply awareness and consideration is to fail to identify the opportunity to build long-term brand value while delivering immediate revenue growth.
The challenge here, as always, is to have the right combination of capabilities and resources, either outsourced or in-house. And that challenge is now more complex. This requires you to take a strategic approach to managing your roster of agencies and marketing services suppliers. We help our marketing clients understand the current capabilities within their roster of agencies and align these to their strategic and tactical requirements. It is a process that identifies duplication, gaps and waste and improves performance and productivity.
This means looking at the capabilities, productivity, fees and contracts of your individual agencies to ensure you have the right combination and mix. This includes all agencies from media to creative to digital and data, as well as all of the marketing services providers you have inside and outside your organisation. Optimising the performance of each one, individually and collectively, will amplify the performance of your advertising investment across the entire funnel.
Discover more on our approach to this challenge here.
Media Management
Paid media is often the single largest line item in the Advertising and Promotions budget. It is a significant investment in a category that offers more new channel options and choice than ever before. For wise advertisers it is essential to know the right channels and right environments not just to reach your audience, but also to engage that audience with your message at a time and place to illicit the response you need. And then to be able to deliver this at scale.
The price of media is but one consideration in assessing value – either the value of delivery or value in response. This is why our approach to media is two-fold. Rather than focusing on retrospective reviews of media costs, we focus on current media strategy, delivery and results. Our industry-based assessment is designed not only to provide you with an understanding of how well your media budget is being invested, but also to identify all of the opportunities to improve that investment.
We also provide a complete commercial assessment of all aspects of your agency contracts and fees, ensuring a clearly defined framework for your media investment to deliver you the best value possible in the short term and into a sustainable future. And all of this is before we have even considered your owned, earned and shared media performance as well.
Discover more on our approach to this challenge here.
Data and Technology Management
Customer or first party data is worth its weight in gold. Enabled by technology, the ability to plan, engage and deliver to your existing customer base and to find more of the same types of valuable people has never been more available to marketers. But this approach is about more than just the technology.
Too often we have been working with marketers who have the technology, but then struggle to realise the transformational and performance results promised at the time of purchase. Why? Data presents the opportunity to be more customer-focused and responsive. But this is a strategic decision that has significant implications for the organisation, its marketing function and its external agencies and suppliers. None of this is addressed by the technology platform, which is simply an enabler of that strategic decision.
To solve this challenge, we take an approach that is both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down, from the data-informed strategy, planning out the implications for the business. Bottom-up, in defining the current state and how this will be impacted by the new customer-centric strategy and the application of technology to enable it. Whether implemented ahead of a purchase decision on technology, or following a failing implementation, our approach quickly identifies and resolves the issues.
Discover more on our approach to this challenge here.
Implementation Management
Technology, automation and new working methodologies in project management, team communications and the production process are offering marketers the opportunity to get to market faster than ever before. This is just as well, as marketers have more to do and create, across more channels, more often than ever before.
But success is never as simple as taking existing ways of working and expecting these magically to change once technology is added or a process methodology is adopted. The transition from a traditional way of working to any new way of working requires clear alignment in expectations, planning and execution. This crucial step is often overlooked in the race to deliver faster and lower cost marketing implementation.
Methodologies such as Agile can rarely be applied universally, or on a ‘set and forget’ basis, across the processes of a marketing organisation. There will always be projects and teams that need to work differently from others, and how these interact with the rest of the organisation is nearly always critical to the real-world success of any tech or methodology implementation.
We work with advertisers and their agencies to define and assess the current go-to-market process, identifying opportunities, aligning expectations, removing blockages, and streamlining production and implementation processes to deliver ‘faster, cheaper’ more consistently, without compromising essential quality.
Discover more on our approach to this challenge here.
Net Zero Emission Management
The Climate Crisis is impacting us all. Consumers are asking ever-harder questions of brands as we all address the conundrum of how to consume but not destroy the planet. Until now, the emerging answers have largely been the domain of process engineers looking to reduce the GHG emissions of the manufacturing process. But increasingly, consumers are becoming aware of the environmental impact of marketing and advertising on the planet.
While some marketers struggle to see how their marketing can achieve Net.Zero Emissions, others are looking for ways to use the process to align marketing with overall organisational strategy on the Climate Crisis. Our approach, firstly, is to understand better the points of significant GHG emissions in the current marketing process. The intention is not simply to offset this to achieve Net.Zero. Instead, our experience is that this is an opportunity for marketers to use the process to reduce waste and therefore cost within their marketing program.
Secondly, going beyond Scope 1 and 2 emissions, we look at the upstream and downstream GHG emissions of marketing. This includes not only all types of marketing production, but also media – including paid, owned, earned and shared. Only by looking at the entire marketing supply chain can we identify all of the points where either changing or stopping activities can lead to significant reduction in waste, while maintaining or improving performance.
Discover more on our approach to this challenge here.
If you would like to see all of our solutions listed together on one page, you will find them here.
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