The role of the CMO and the marketing function as a whole are going through a dramatic evolution – if not a complete reinvention. Historically, marketing has been a competency and business model driven by brand visibility and the latest creative campaign, but today’s senior marketers are redefining their impact on the demand chain by linking closer to product management and the downstream sales channels.

To maintain a “seat at the table”, leading CMOs are focusing greater attention on performance and accountability to clarify business impact, and defining a new marketing model around media integration; a more digital-centric, self-learning customer base; and executional excellence driven less by “creative” and more by process excellence, infrastructure scale, and analytic insight. We call this new model Marketing 2.0.

Our analytic and measurement capabilities are provided by our Marketing Sciences team, but that’s only part of the story.  Marketing 2.0 reflects a strategic shift in how programs and resources are deployed, how processes are built or rebuilt to improve marketing and sales integration, how marketers create operational rigor from global to local activities, and fundamentally how marketing organizations align activities, messaging, pricing, and offers in a more scalable, responsive customer-centric manner. 

MarketBridge’s Marketing Management practice works with global corporations to transform their marketing functions - building strategies, operating models, organizations, programs and infrastructure to bring them to the next level of marketing performance.

Customer Development Strategy

It’s generally acknowledged that there is more value in extending customer relationships than focusing primarily on net-new acquisition.  The challenge: even the most sophisticated companies lack the segmentation and discipline to focus marketing dollars on the most valuable (or potentially valuable) customers, while understanding the offers, pricing and experience that will drive share-of-wallet.  While most marketers over-emphasize prospecting, MarketBridge works with CMOs to develop a value creation roadmap, clarifying value- and needs-based segments that integrate insights from three areas: which offers, bundles, and pricing drive pipeline and conversion; which customers are worth pursuing and with what investment; and which marketing media and tactics drive the greatest yield

This is not a branding exercise.  It’s an empirically-driven planning and investment allocation process to drive customer value.

Offering & Solution Development

As companies continue to release new products, and entire industries continue to consolidate, marketing and sales channels lack the capacity to adequately market against corporations’ growing portfolio of products and services.  Increasingly, companies are fighting for customer share by creating customer solution bundles that meet a broader set of strategic customer needs, while cross-selling specific offerings across peer buyers.

This trend portends a new era in innovation beyond mere physical product features.  Historically, sales channels have assembled these custom solutions at the point of sale, but today, leading marketers are jumping in to create scale around solution development and marketing, as well as product cross-sell and attach.  MarketBridge partners with companies to shorten this time frame from product innovation to customer revenue, redefining marketing roles and organizational processes, and packaging offers and value propositions that are more “channel-ready” to both sales channels and customers.

Customer-Driven Relationship Marketing

The relationship marketing vision translates to “right product, right channel, right time.”  Financially, the opportunity cost of not implementing customer-driven programs is visible in the “lead black hole” – the gap between marketing responses and qualified sales leads.  For most companies this gap remains significant, with the traditional fix merely to bombard prospects and customers with even more offers and campaigns.  The fact that most CRM installations are nothing more than glorified contact management systems has only exacerbated this challenge, and continuing to focus on product-centric campaigns to drive pipeline only ignores another truth:  customers are in charge and increasingly conducting their diligence via the web, based on their own purchase cycle.

MarketBridge is working with companies to build customer-driven capabilities – in-bound customer-driven response engines that systematically guide web-learners to self-identify through the marketing and sales cycle, as well as outbound, multi-tactic processes that accelerate pipeline and recapture and nurture responses to qualified opportunities

Integrated Demand Generation Engine

Perhaps the most significant design point of Marketing 2.0 is integrating these new competencies – analytics, interactive, telechannels, relationship marketing and process excellence – into a demand generation engine.  Because some of these new capabilities reflect significant investment, the “engine” design is akin to a manufacturing facility that undoubtedly cannot reside in every country.

MarketBridge is actively working with clients to design, build, transition and even operate marketing demand generation engines in the Americas, EMEA and APAC – fundamentally constructing a scalable platform to manage marketing investment targeted to specific segments and producing predictable pipeline that can be converted or adjudicated to local sales channels.

Global Sourcing Management

The new marketing model represents a radical shift in agency utilization, resource skills, marketing roles and the connection from centralized corporate advertising to localized field marketing.  The emphasis on marketing accountability, combined with the fragmentation of media now requires CMOs to reallocate marketing spend across a broader variety of media and tactics that connect awareness to qualified leads in a systematic and scalable manner.  An important driver – and, quite often, a huge source of investment efficiency – is rationalizing the marketing agency and provider network that has failed to achieve the consistency, efficiency and speed promised by the conglomerates.  As marketers continue to drive integrated campaigns, there is huge opportunity to drive fee efficiency, consistent performance accountability, and process discipline across product launches, corporate-to-field initiatives, and country-by-country deployment. 

MarketBridge has worked with several global enterprises to drive independent performance management; rationalize AR/PR, media, direct response, interactive, web, event, tele-operations, analytics, data, and other marketing factor providers; and restructure contracts to optimize provider expense – that together produce greater campaign yield and global adoption.

Finally, we build these capabilities to increase the yield of marketing investments directed at both customers and distribution partners.  Channel Management summarizes MarketBridge’s services and expertise in working with indirect channels, while our Integrated Marketing team delivers specific in-market program execution and channel enablement services.