IBM Software July 2011 Thought Leadership White Paper. What is MRM, and why are marketers investing in this technology?

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1 IBM Software July 2011 Thought Leadership White Paper What is MRM, and why are marketers investing in this technology?

2 2 What is MRM, and why are marketers investing in this technology? A time of unprecedented opportunities and challenges Organizations are increasingly recognizing the centrality of marketing to their success, with marketers now being asked to help drive strategic corporate initiatives. In fact, enlightened CEOs are looking to marketing to drive the entire customer experience. In the future, marketers will play growing roles in virtually every facet of the business. But, along with this unprecedented opportunity, marketers face equally unprecedented pressures and challenges. Marketers can no longer rely on heavy investments in advertising to attract customers or retain loyalty. In today s customer-centric environment, they must run more finely targeted cross-channel programs, drawing on more data, and selecting from more diverse media options. They must plan, create, test and deliver programs faster, with fewer resources. They must meet tougher standards of accountability for each program s contribution to business goals. And they must comply with mounting restrictions that touch everything from compliance to privacy. How can marketers manage all this new complexity, while making the most of their new opportunities? The core challenge: Disconnected systems and processes Worldwide, marketers spend USD1+ trillion each year. Yet most still manage their projects through a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, word processing documents, and other disconnected applications. This approach results in unnecessary cost and delay. It restricts coordination and collaboration. It makes metrics difficult to capture, and even more difficult to leverage in process improvement. As marketing becomes more deeply involved in shaping customer experiences across multiple touch points, projects become more sophisticated and complex. Using legacy tools, managers, analysts, creative and production staffers find it increasingly difficult to keep pace. The result: greater employee turnover, lower quality and higher costs. The solution: Integrated marketing planning and management From supply chains to sales force management, many business functions have faced similar challenges, and found a similar solution: invest in a flexible, integrated application that supports best-practice processes. Now, with Marketing Resource Management (MRM), the same approach is available to marketers. MRM is software that systematically addresses marketers requirements for better planning, budgeting, process management and tracking. Using MRM as a foundation, marketers can optimize virtually all their processes, refocusing scarce resources on understanding their customers, defining strategies and delivering more creative solutions. MRM provides a collaborative framework for marketers to manage all their activities and easily share project specifications and production data with colleagues and partners. It provides tools for planning workflows, assigning tasks and resources, and tracking projects. It helps organizations establish repeatable processes for developing campaign logic and creative materials, automating approvals and auditing. And, with MRM, successful programs can be reused quickly, easily and at very low cost.

3 IBM Software 3 MRM brings together: Operations and process management - MRM provides a central place for establishing and communicating objectives, defining activities to achieve them, managing execution, and tracking and analyzing results. Budgeting and expense management - MRM helps marketers manage budgets and expenses to meet their own needs and those of other stakeholders. Storage of re-usable work - With MRM s secure, centrally managed storage, any deliverable created by marketing be it a specific creative file or something less tangible such as the product specification of an envelope, the details of a trade show venue, or the definition of a target audience for advertising can be easily accessed and re-used by any authorized user, using a standard web browser. Utilizing these capabilities, marketing organizations can achieve dramatic operational and ROI improvements, benefiting from best-practice processes without imposing new complexity or stifling creativity. Assessing MRM s benefits MRM adopters have achieved powerful improvements in velocity, visibility, capacity, alignment and compliance. Velocity By capturing project management best practices and establishing standard processes for campaign logic, creative development, program execution and analysis, organizations can streamline campaign delivery, and systematically eliminate any delays. MRM eliminates approval-related bottlenecks by making marketing materials more accessible for review, and automating approval workflows, including reminders that keep reviewers on schedule. Through customized project templates, MRM helps organizations improve coordination, quickly implement best practices, and eliminate rush fees, rework, compliance fines and duplication. Templates ensure that everyone even new employees understands what must be done next, by whom and when. Visibility As a marketing system of record, MRM provides immediate visibility into all marketing operations. Instead of relying on meetings, and voic , project stakeholders have a clear, current view of activities, project status, budgets, resource availability and performance. Managers can consistently measure and track programs throughout their life cycles. Teams can identify issues faster, and make timely course corrections. Managers can optimize budgets, improve resource utilization, synchronize market activities, and determine true ROI for each program. It is easier to halt under-performing initiatives and reallocate their funds. Finally, decision-makers gain detailed benchmarking data for continuous improvement. Outside vendors can be tightly linked and closely managed, improving accountability and reducing cost. Moreover, MRM can support vendor consolidation strategies that can drive even greater efficiencies. Capacity Adopters report that MRM increases their capacity, helping them respond effectively to growing demand. With MRM, marketing teams can design, develop, execute, and analyze more programs, because they are freed from inefficient processes and resource-consuming bottlenecks in project development and approval.

4 4 What is MRM, and why are marketers investing in this technology? Second, using MRM s central project repository, project teams have immediate access to best practices and prior program templates. They can staff and launch new projects more rapidly, drawing on up-to-date information about resource availability, and accurate historical information about comparable projects. Third, the storage and management of re-usable work enables marketers to leverage existing, creative briefs, graphics, direct mail, advertising copy and even promotional themes, specifications, offers and targeting. Alignment Marketing expenditures have greater impact when marketing is consistently aligned with business strategy, but companies have found alignment difficult to achieve. MRM promotes it in several ways. First, MRM creates a top-down planning workspace where high-level marketing plans and budgets are captured and communicated to the entire organization. Next, MRM can centralize strategic goals, marketing plans and budgets, helping companies ensure that all new projects reflect agreed-upon goals, objectives, and tactics. For example, MRM is typically configured to prevent expenditures that are not matched to a specific marketing objective. Compliance Changing compliance rules, privacy regulations, and customer preferences introduce new risks for marketers. MRM s standard approval processes, collaborative markup, automatic revision logs, version control, and audit trails ensure that every finished deliverable has been carefully reviewed and tracked. Finally, the best MRM systems easily integrate with other enterprise systems, ensuring that external stakeholders from finance and counsel to line managers have easy access to compliance information. Achieving rapid payback Customers using IBM s Unica Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solutions have reported payback in six to nine months, and project cycle-time decreases of 50 percent or more. MRM, one key component of the rapidly growing EMM software category, is increasingly purchased as part of a suite of software that optimizes every facet of marketing. Conclusion Today, marketing has unprecedented opportunities. But, to fully leverage them, marketers must systematically optimize their processes and achieve far greater accountability. MRM offers the best path to attaining these goals. The system s increased transparency makes it more difficult for projects to run off track, or operate under the radar. Finally, centralized asset management ensures that every marketer utilizes the same approved creative resources.

5 IBM Software 5 About IBM Unica solutions IBM Unica products are innovative marketing solutions that turn your passion for marketing into business success. Our comprehensive approach to interactive marketing enables organizations worldwide to understand their customers and use that understanding to engage buyers in highly relevant, interactive dialogues across digital, social, and traditional marketing channels. Recognized as a leading integrator of enterprise systems for multiple industries, we help organizations with a wide variety of projects, analyzing real-time information and returning measurable value to stakeholders. In addition, we provide worldwide support for a variety of industry-partner content, services and applications. For more information To learn more about IBM Unica solutions, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/info/unica. Smarter Commerce: An integrated approach IBM Unica products are part of the IBM Smarter Commerce initiative. Smarter Commerce is a unique approach that increases the value companies generate for their customers, partners and shareholders in a rapidly changing digital world. To learn more about Smarter Commerce, visit ibm.com/smarterplanet/commerce.

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