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Accenture

Companies are once again making growth their top strategicobjective. According to The Conference Board, morethan 52 percent of CEOs identify top-line growth astheir highest priority. To achieve growth, The ConferenceBoard reports, these CEOs are looking to improve the speed, flexibilityand adaptability of their organizations (42 percent); improve customerloyalty and retention (41 percent); and stimulate innovation(31 percent).

Companies are once again making growth their top strategic objective. According to The Conference Board, more than 52 percent of CEOs identify top-line growth as their highest priority. To achieve growth, The Conference Board reports, these CEOs are looking to improve the speed, flexibility and adaptability of their organizations (42 percent); improve customer loyalty and retention (41 percent); and stimulate innovation (31 percent).

The Growth Agenda

Accenture research has revealed that high-performance companies achieve growth in part by mastering specific marketing capabilities (see Figure 1). To enable these capabilities, Accenture recommends a new approach to managing marketing assets based on best thinking from the disciplines of marketing resource management, enterprise content management and knowledge management, and enabled with leading-edge technology. We term this approach marketing asset management (MAM).

MAM is a coherent, integrated platform for extracting real value from marketing assets, such as research, competitive intelligence and best practices, by improving the creation, control, aggregation, distribution, management, reuse and repurpose of these assets. MAM improves business performance along several dimensions, including strategy development, brand management, innovation, campaign creation and execution, performance management and employee competence.

According to Gartner Research, more than 85 percent of Global 1000 companies will deploy some form of marketing resource management (MRM) capability by 2006, to better manage digital assets. That said, through 2007 less than 40 percent of Global 1000 companies will acquire MRM solutions that incorporate knowledge management capabilities that associate detailed information with specific marketing assets and programs.

MAM fills this gap by acting as a bookend to the conventional MRM implementation. At the front end, MAM provides a knowledge repository and knowledge management tools that improve strategy development and increase innovation. At the back end, it provides access and delivery capabilities that ensure marketing assets get into the right hands at the right time.

Market Pressures and Organizational Barriers

Several characteristics of the current business environment make improving MAM an imperative.

Growth in Information. Each year, the volume of marketing information increases exponentially – not only internal information but external information as well, such as public opinion and competitive intelligence available through Internet news sites, discussion boards and even personal blogs. Organizations that do not learn to effectively, efficiently manage and leverage information from this wide range of sources will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Customer Empowerment. The Internet also gives consumers unprecedented access to information. Many prospects conduct significant research on products and services before making a purchase decision. Companies that do not have equal or better information access than their customers risk losing control of the selling situation.

Compressed Life Cycles. As product life cycles grow shorter, companies that wish to remain competitive must accelerate their ability to innovate and introduce new products and services.

Commoditization. As commoditization accelerates, companies must differentiate themselves by delivering a consistent customer experience aligned with customer preferences and behaviors. Delivering such an experience requires cross-functional, crossenterprise collaboration and orchestration.

Increased Accountability. In the era of Sarbanes-Oxley, failure to exert appropriate controls will create major problems. Smart companies are increasing their ability to ensure compliance and mitigate risk.

Meeting these imperatives through MAM can produce significant benefits. However, most organizations must also overcome significant obstacles in order to leverage their marketing assets and knowledge fully.

The overarching challenge is the sheer volume of marketing information. Extracting meaningful insights from the ocean of information that can be accessed is challenging, but doing so allows marketing executives to create more compelling marketing strategies.

Accenture research and client work reveals five key challenges related to MAM.

Lack of Accessibility. Marketing assets are scattered across the organization, forcing users to access multiple portals. Finding the best marketing and sales information and assets is often the result of luck or long searches, if they are found at all.

Limited Control. Most organizations lack an effective mechanism for controlling the use of marketing and sales assets. Multiple versions of the same materials proliferate and use compliance is a problem because there is little information about who can use the materials and for what purpose.

Distribution Problems. Without effective methods of pushing the right materials to the right individual at the right time, generating value from marketing or sales assets is a hit-or-miss proposition. As much as 90 percent of all marketing/sales materials are never touched by the salesforce because they are either irrelevant or out of date.

Limited Collaboration. Many organizations lack the tools to facilitate effective and efficient asset creation. If they exist, collaboration tools rarely include external stakeholders such as suppliers or channel partners. Unnecessary or redundant work diminishes the value of the collaboration that does occur. The benefit of addressing this shortcoming is real: by revamping its platform for trade marketing collaboration, one packaged goods company increased selling time, sales revenue and promotions effectiveness while producing $10 million to $12 million in cost savings.

Employee Turnover. High churn among marketing personnel prevents effectively documenting, much less internalizing, lessons from past marketing efforts. As a result, companies must invest more in training while struggling to identify and replicate best practices across the enterprise.

In addition, the distinctive nature of marketing and sales assets often makes them more challenging to manage than assets from other functional areas. Enterprise-level content management systems, for example, often do not take into account the unique characteristics of marketing and sales assets and therefore are less effective.

The Business Case

While the challenges to implementing an improved approach to managing marketing assets can be significant, the benefits are considerable. Better yet, these benefits are felt almost immediately in most organizations. When implemented thoughtfully and with rigor, MAM gives marketers the opportunity to generate multiple value streams quickly.

Increased Efficiency

More efficient marketing execution can produce large cost savings. For example, proactively providing employees with the most relevant marketing and sales materials eliminates lengthy information searches – thereby reducing the cost of creating and implementing marketing programs. Companies can also use the time saved to improve operations further, or to drive growth with new programs.

Shared knowledge and best practices reduce marketing costs by curing the reinventing-the-wheel syndrome. Sharing knowledge and using best practices also decreases time-to-proficiency and increases the flexibility of the workforce.

As organizations deliver materials to end users faster, speed to market is improved. As organizations become more efficient in program development and management in addition to execution, nonworking marketing spend declines.

Increased Effectiveness

The ability to draw together disparate types of information – research, competitive intelligence, customer insight, best practices, campaign tracking, etc. – from multiple sources across and beyond the enterprise increases the chances of developing insightful, innovative products and compelling marketing programs. With more targeted products, services and campaign success rates improve, as demonstrated by customer acquisition trends (market share) and retention levels (lifetime value).

Furthermore, the use of knowledge management and best practices facilitates more effective decision-making, driving greater revenue and profitability. Organizations are able to redirect spend and reallocate assets to achieve the greatest profit.

A corollary benefit is that the risk of asset misuse declines. Marketing teams are often under such tremendous pressure to get to market that programs are launched without proper due diligence. The misuse of marketing assets can result in significant hard costs for an organization through government fines or court judgments. In addition, damage to the brand may carry an even greater cost.

Accenture’s research and work with the marketing teams at global companies show that $35 million to $70 million in annual benefits can be derived from a typical $1 billion brand by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of existing marketing assets. These results do not include the huge value that may be generated by introducing innovative new products and services. A breakdown of the impact of MAM at this organization shows improvement across a range of performance dimensions (see Figure 2):

• Increased Productivity/Capacity: 10 to 13 percent increase in marketing capacity;
• Reduced Marketing Costs: 2 to 6 percent reduction in marketingrelated expenses;
• Improved Initiative Success: .02 to .03 percent increase in profit margin (as percentage of sales); and
• Improved Profit Margins: 1 to 2.5 percent increase in profit margin (as a percentage of sales).

Accenture’s experience with clients suggests that efforts to enhance MAM can provide a return ranging from six to 12 times the investment made in technology applications, hardware and related professional services.

The Marketing Asset Management Solution

• An effective MAM solution should include four essential elements:
• A thoughtful review and reconciliation of the information and assets held by marketing across the enterprise;
• A transformation of marketing processes that support how work gets done;
• A realignment of the organization to support a new way of working, particularly the sharing of knowledge across the organization; and
• The implementation of an integrated marketing technology platform.

Asset Review

The volume of marketing data, information and assets held by most organizations is staggering. A methodical review of this material often reveals assets that are redundant, inaccurate, out of date or rarely used. Reconciling these assets against current campaign strategy speeds the development of a marketing asset solution – and often reveals significant cost-saving opportunities.

Work on a content architecture and information model can begin after the asset review. Key steps include:

• Content/Knowledge Map. Map existing content in the enterprise to identify gaps in content that need to be developed, as well as content type and owner. Also, define a taxonomy that structures content organization.
• Content Development Processes. Identify content development and maintenance processes for each type of content currently being managed by the enterprise. When documenting these processes, consider many factors including users, such as content creators, editors and owners, as well as content type.
• Content Development Plan. Based on the results of the content/ knowledge map, create a plan for developing missing content. Additionally, define a removal and archival strategy in order to delete or archive duplicate and obsolete content.
• Common Components. Analyze assets to identify common components. This analysis promotes the ability to write once/reuse anywhere. Reusable assets reduce the time and cost of asset maintenance.
• Content Templates. Using the knowledge map, taxonomy and common content components, develop templates that indicate which assets are presented to the user and in what manner.

Process Transformation

Imposing processes on marketing teams that thrive on flexibility is not easy. To derive value from MAM, organizations must be willing to change the way they work. We recommend focusing on changing highly tactical marketing processes, such as campaign planning or message development, where the fastest returns from process redesign and asset usage can be seen.

The first steps should be to understand what gains are likely from specific changes, such as barriers to competition or switching disincentives, and prioritize these areas.

Organizational Alignment

MAM is a holistic solution, requiring changes in organizational enablers in addition to process and technology redesign in order to realize full value. Building a degree of comfort with a new technology, not to mention fundamentally changing how work is done and decisions made, requires a strong focus on organizational alignment. The managers leading these changes should be sensitive to aspects of the organization where MAM can have its greatest impact.

• Organization Alignment. Managers must ensure alignment across the enterprise. It is particularly important that the organization’s top performers are aligned with the strategic goals of the MAM solution. In addition, content, processes and training need to be aligned with the strategic goals.
• Decision-Making Governance. MAM can significantly affect how decisions are made and how governance processes work. For example, corporate governance needs to reinforce information sharing and teaming to break down historical silos and old power bases.
• Performance Management/Compensation. Managers need to set clear performance expectations around using MAM. Tying use of the MAM system to compensation or performance objectives can drive the right behavior.
• Training and Development. Aligning roles and responsibilities, as well as identifying gaps in skills and developing a curriculum to address them are critical.

Integrated Technology Platform

The ideal approach to MAM integrates tools for managing:

• External knowledge (compiling insight about public sentiment, competitive intelligence and customer insight)
• Organizational knowledge (transferring best practices, lessons learned and tacit knowledge)
• Internal knowledge (creating, organizing, managing and reusing brand and marketing materials)
• Knowledge dissemination across the enterprise, affiliates and channel partners

Compiling External Knowledge

Accenture has identified a number of technology assets valuable to extract and compile external information relevant to marketing campaigns, such as public opinion, competitive intelligence and customer insight.

• A powerful search-and-analyze tool that combs through a set of pre-selected Internet sites for public opinions that are relevant to a specific topic and then analyzes each opinion as positive, negative or neutral.
• An event advisor that monitors publicly available information for competitive insights about the extended enterprise and its business ecosystem.

Leveraging Organizational Knowledge

Surrounding every marketing effort is knowledge that is typically not documented but which can provide a tremendous value. Best practices, lessons learned and other tacit knowledge help to continually improve processes and train new resources.