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Trudging off to vote this morning I remembered Walter Mondale's famous "Where's the beef" crack way back in 1984. Amazingly, the negative character of this year's elections makes that Orwellian campaign seem substantive by comparison. Fortunately, I'm buoyed with more optimism from our own industry. A few days at ITSMA's annual conference last month gave me much more confidence that services marketers are shifting slowly but surely toward the strategies necessary to succeed in a slow-growth economy. If only our politicians would show the same level of maturity. PS. Who was Walter Mondale criticizing?
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From global rollouts of new services to dramatically improved loyalty programs, the 11 winners of ITSMA's 2002 Services Marketing Excellence (SME) Awards demonstrated tremendous grace under pressure during a year of extreme financial constraints and customer scrutiny. "In a time when marketers need to justify every dollar of spending," notes ITSMA president and CEO Dave Munn, "this year's winners combined innovative concepts with rock-solid execution to generate substantial business results." ITSMA launched the SME Awards in 1998 to focus attention on standout performance in marketing technology services and solutions. Unlike many marketing awards that emphasize advertising and communications, the SME Awards reflect ITSMA's comprehensive approach to marketing. This year's awards program covered five main categories: new services development, solutions marketing, increasing sales effectiveness, brand and reputation management, and customer loyalty and retention. The 2002 awards also featured a special recognition award. The awards honor excellence at two levels. Diamond Award winners are best in class, demonstrating excellence and leadership across three criteria of performance: innovation, execution, and business results. Gold Award winners also demonstrate standout achievement in their categories.
The daily grind of struggling for business in a down economy often obscures the tremendous progress that services marketers have made in the last decade. Ten years ago services marketers were often marginal players in the technology world; today they have taken center stage in developing corporate strategy, creating dynamic brands, building relationships with customers, and tracking business results. The 2002 SME Award winners remind us of the power that services marketing can have and the success to which we can all aspire. [TOP OF PAGE] Research Desk Marketing Priorities for 2003: Highlights from MarketingServices Annual Conference More than 100 services marketers representing a cross-section of top technology firms gathered at ITSMA's ninth annual MarketingServices conference October 14-16 to review the state of the field and explore new strategies and tactics to generate profitable growth in 2003. Assuming only a modest technology rebound next year, participants at
ITSMA's MarketingServices/2002 conference in Atlanta delved deeply into
the implications of a slow-growth future for IT services. In this context,
according to ITSMA president and CEO Dave Munn, the top challenges for
services marketers in 2003 are to move beyond the crisis and cutback
mode of the past year and a half and to orient marketing more fully
around the business value of IT solutions. Marketing organizations need
to create a new equilibrium, said Munn—a more balanced approach
that incorporates investments in longer-term growth as well as immediate
sales and profits. As conference speakers and participants discussed “marketing’s new reality,” five objectives for 2003 emerged:
Marketers are confident that despite myriad pressures and constraints they can make significant strides in the coming year to build more effective and value-oriented organizations. It certainly won't be easy. As Robert Painter, vice president of integrated marketing communications at IBM Global Services, put it, "You need to resist the tremendous gravitational pull back to the old ways of product-oriented selling during the downturn." The rewards of creating a new value-driven approach in marketing, however, can be enormous. The IT market might be maturing, as Dave Munn noted, but there remain substantial opportunities for firms that put forward compelling solutions to customers' core business challenges. BearingPoint Gets the Metrics "Making marketing accountable" has been a dominant concern throughout the technology sector over the last year, with many firms' marketing organizations pushing hard to create quantifiable measurement systems. For BearingPoint, formerly KPMG Consulting, the push has resulted in an extremely useful marketing scorecard that addresses four familiar objectives:
Linda Rebrovick, BearingPoint's chief marketing officer, described the scorecard at ITSMA's recent MarketingServices/2002 annual conference. The goal of the scorecard, according to Rebrovick, is to have an objective process that measures marketing performance across three primary goals: generating business results, creating strong brand awareness and preference, and maximizing BearingPoint's unique culture. Building the scorecard (a process that included help from ITSMA) required establishment of a limited number of critical metrics that would feed into an overall performance measure. For example, Rebrovick and her team decided to focus on four primary metrics to evaluate success for the goal of generating business results: filling the pipeline, supporting key accounts, helping to drive bookings, and managing the marketing budget. Each of these metrics, in turn, is derived from supporting metrics. Filling the pipeline is thus measured by the number of new leads in target markets. Once the metrics were in place, BearingPoint marketers had to define a set of tools or processes to determine the scores. In looking at the "increase awareness" metric in the brand area, for example, the team decided to use two outside resources, IDC and ITSMA. For the goal of maximizing BearingPoint's culture, the team relies on employee surveys. The scoreboard itself provides an integrated view of overall marketing performance based on a rollup of all the metrics, with different weighting for different goals and objectives. BearingPoint marketers and top executives can therefore get an immediate pulse on marketing performance by looking at a single number. They can also, of course, drill down for a more detailed look at the individual metrics for each area. The process of developing the scoreboard took longer and was a greater challenge than expected, according to Rebrovick. And becoming more accountable means communicating all marketing results, not just the successes. Amid a period of tremendous change, however, including global rebranding and integrating 17 acquisitions in the last six months, the scoreboard has proved enormously valuable in keeping marketing focused on the most important goals and activities. With little time or budget to spare in today's economy, such focus can be the critical edge needed to ensure marketing success. For more information on marketing accountability and scorecards, check out ITSMA's Dashboards and Beyond: Building a Value Measurement System for Marketing at http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/U0038.htm. Dashboards and Beyond is available free to members with online access and for sale to nonmembers. Tech Poll: Little Hope for Year-end Spending Surge The CIO Magazine Tech Poll provides a monthly assessment of technology buying trends from a broad cross-section of chief information officers, mostly from North America. The latest survey, conducted October 10-17, 2002, shows little sign of any fourth-quarter increase in IT spending and slightly lower projections for 2003 than did September's poll. October key findings include:
October Tech Poll figures were based on 316 survey responses, with 96.5% from North America. CIOs made up 89% of the total respondents. The respondents represent a broad cross-section of industries, including technology services, manufacturing, finance, state and local government, healthcare, and wholesale and retail distribution. For complete survey results, visit http://www.cio.com/info/releases/110102_techpoll.pdf.
Research Opportunities: Sign Up Now for ITSMA's Fall 2002 Market Positioning Studies Take the pulse of today's market and get actionable data to improve your market position. ITSMA Market Positioning and Brand Awareness Studies provide participants with valuable insight on such critical issues as awareness and positioning of market leaders, favorability and preference ratings, key sources of influence, and purchase evaluation criteria. Fall 2002 studies include the following:
[TOP OF PAGE] EuroNotes: Measuring the Value of Marketing: A European Perspective Services marketers in Europe believe that customer satisfaction is the most important measure of marketing success, according to a recent ITSMA Europe survey. Only a few of the survey participants, however, are tracking satisfaction systematically. Most focus their measurement efforts on just a few metrics such as lead generation, market share, and brand awareness. Generally speaking, the use of value measurement systems by European services marketers is at an early stage. Survey participants believe that they are not yet doing a good job in evaluating the return on marketing investment; neither are they doing a great job in communicating their findings to senior management or other important internal constituencies. As a result of weak measurement systems, many services marketers in Europe lack confidence in their ability to take a strong and authoritative stand on issues that affect growth and profitability. Given the growing pressures on marketers to justify any and all activities, there is now great interest in developing more effective systems. Looking ahead, marketers need to set clear objectives, break those objectives down into measurable activities, and communicate quantifiable results on a regular basis. —Bev Burgess, info@itsma.com Get the full story: The new ITSMA Europe presentation, Services Marketing Metrics: A European Perspective, is available free to all ITSMA Europe members and for sale to others. For more information or to download or purchase this presentation, visit http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLBEU100802.htm. [TOP OF PAGE] Toolbox: Strengthening Lead Management Each month ITSMA highlights a new idea, application, or other type of tool that marketers can use immediately to strengthen their programs and organizations. In today's slow-growth economy, many companies are struggling to meet their sales targets as new opportunities become less and less frequent. All too often, however, companies miss important sales opportunities because they have failed to optimize their lead management systems. ITSMA's Strengthening Lead Management provides marketers with seven questions to evaluate lead management systems and identify areas for improvement. The tool covers such critical areas as executive involvement, sales training and support, incentives, and marketing-sales collaboration. With quality leads harder and harder to come by, marketers can ill-afford to rely on processes that waste time on long shots and let some of the good ones slip through the cracks. Visit http://www.itsma.com/research/toolkit_free/lead_mgmt_gl.htm to view and download the tool. [TOP OF PAGE] Upcoming Events November 19 Breakfast Briefing: Winning More Business in Technology Services (free to members; Sunnyvale, CA) Buyers today scrutinize services providers more rigorously, demand more proof of value, and take longer to decide than ever before. Join ITSMA's Dave Munn and Julie Schwartz to learn how you can address buyers' most pressing concerns and increase services sales effectiveness. For more information or to register online, visit http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/E11190202.htm or contact Carolyn Jefferson at +1-781-862-8500, ext. 21, or cjefferson@itsma.com. November 20 Executive Roundtable: Preparing for Growth in 2003 (invitation only; San Francisco, CA) Marketing execs: Take an afternoon to discuss next year's key challenges with your peers. Core topics for ITSMA's Executive Roundtable include rebalancing marketing priorities, closing the sales and marketing gap, and improving marketing accountability. This event is by invitation only for marketing executives from ITSMA member companies. For more information on obtaining an invitation, visit http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/E11200200.htm. November 25-27 Client-Centric Marketing Course: A Framework for Technology Services Marketing (Beaconsfield, UK) ITSMA Europe's Client-Centric Marketing Course provides a practical framework for marketing technology services in Europe, with special attention to such urgent issues as brand relevance, value propositions, client loyalty, and sales effectiveness. Bev Burgess, professional services director of ITSMA Europe, will lead the course along with marketing leaders and experts from the Cranfield School of Management, Chartered Institute of Marketing, and Fujitsu Services. For more information or to register online, visit http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/E11250200.htm or contact ITSMA Europe at +44 (0) 1892 523060 or info@itsma.com. December 4-6 Client-Centric Marketing Course: Accelerating Services Growth (Boston, MA) The North American edition of ITSMA's signature services marketing course provides an intensive, hands-on learning experience focused on the core client-relationship issues that services marketers need most to succeed. The course is led by Steve Hurley, ITSMA's vice president of learning, and Philip Dover, faculty director for Babson College's School of Executive Education, with support from Philip Juliano, vice president of marketing at IBM, and Christopher Hart, a leading expert on client satisfaction and loyalty. For more information or to register online, visit http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/e09240200.htm or contact Lore Griffith at +1-781-862-8500, ext. 19, or lgriffith@itsma.com. December 17 Online Briefing: Making Collaboration Work: Best Practices in Marketing with Partners (free to members)In a time of extreme competitive pressure, creating win/win marketing strategies with partners has become both extremely important and increasingly difficult. Join Julie Schwartz, ITSMA's vice president of research, for an analysis of the results from ITSMA's latest member survey on partner and alliance programs and a review of best practices and recommended initiatives. For more information or to register online, visit http://www.itsma.com/events/event_desc/e11190200.htm or contact Lore Griffith at +1-781-862-8500, ext. 19, or lgriffith@itsma.com. Complete 2002 Events Calendar: http://www.itsma.com/aspfiles/Events/calendar.asp [TOP OF PAGE] Business and Community: Leveraging Brand Power for Good "Great brands will leverage their unique, god-given, superhuman powers for good," according to brand guru Scott Bedbury, who led two of the most successful brand strategies in recent history, Nike's "Just Do It" campaign and Starbucks reinvention of the coffee category. Speaking at ITSMA's MarketingServices/2002 annual conference, Bedbury argued that great brands pay extra attention to all stakeholders, including communities, the environment, and "the world." As companies become much more transparent in the wake of recent corporate and financial scandals, the value of being a good corporate citizen becomes even greater. Bedbury's advice is for companies to focus on what they do well already and then find a place to do it where it is needed most. Why isn't Amazon.com giving books to Afghanistan, he wonders. Why isn't Coca-Cola cleaning up water systems in Africa? Hilary Bruggen, managing director for marketing communications at Qorvis Communications, and a veteran professional services marketing leader from KPMG, james martin + co, and other firms, agrees wholeheartedly with Bedbury. Now is the time to focus on community and charitable work, Bruggen told conference participants. "Everyone is cutting back so this is the best time to increase." Charitable efforts speak directly to the popular mood, according to Bruggen, which emphasizes such themes as community, teamwork, and trustworthiness. Connecting marketing to issues larger than near-term growth and survival is a real challenge in the current economic climate. Marketers are hard-pressed to find dollars even for their most proven techniques. Quick philanthropic hits won't do much either. Given public skepticism about business these days, any community-oriented initiative needs to be legitimately constructive to pass muster. If Bedbury and Bruggen are correct, however, the payoff in corporate credibility is well worth the effort. What's your take on the business value of community and charitable initiatives: nice to do when times are good, or core component of any great company? [TOP OF PAGE] ITSMA in the News
Do you have a services marketing question? (c) Copyright 2002, ITSMA Please forward this newsletter, but only in its entirety. Public citation or publication of any information herein is encouraged but subject to U.S. and international copyright law and conventions. Any citation must include full attribution to ITSMA. Individual graphics or paragraphs can be published without permission as long as attribution to ITSMA is included. Publication of longer selections or complete articles requires ITSMA permission. For permission or more information, contact pr@itsma.com. Subscription Information Subscriptions are available in text and HTML versions. To SUBSCRIBE or to change the format of your subscription, visit http://www.itsma.com/aspfiles/press/ezine.asp. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please e-mail us at unsubscribe@itsma.com. Back issues of ITSMA E-ZINE are available at http://www.itsma.com/press/press_ezine.htm. |
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