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Tibco Spotfire may bring powerful capabilities to the marketing communications plan October 29, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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The press release below offers suggests that Tibco have value to offer customer communications management processes. Whilst the release below positions the Tibco Spotfire solution generically, I believe that its value in the marketing communications process will be significant.

With so many communication channels through which to communicate the multi-dimensional modelling capability will add significantly to the marketing communications plan process and subsequent execution through customer communications management.

In a post a couple of days ago concerning marketing communications planning, I talked about the need to measure elasticity and flexibility in the process and this is a tool that will certainly help that analysis. Anyway, here is the release below:

TIbco today announced the release of the latest version of its flagship in-memory enterprise analytics platform, TIBCO Spotfire® version 2.2, including new 3-D visualization, and introduced TIBCO Spotfire® Network Analytics, a powerful new add-on product. Together, the new software allows business professionals to thoroughly explore relationships between different types of data, revealing hidden risks, fraud, threats and opportunities. In addition, TIBCO announced the TIBCO Spotfire Technology Network, a content-rich online resource for developers who are using the TIBCO Spotfire Software Development Kit to extend and adapt the market’s leading interactive visualization experience to their business needs.

“We’re always excited to hear what new capabilities and features are added as the TIBCO Spotfire enterprise analytics platform continues to evolve. Spotfire® offers the kind of flexible, powerful and extremely usable analytic experience that Wolters Kluwer data subscribers depend upon, and we expect these new visualization capabilities and performance enhancements to keep us at the head of our market in helping our customers find more strategic insights in their Managed Care Data,” said Shiraz Hasan, managing director of Consulting Services, Wolters Kluwer.

Industry Leading Data Visualizations Enhanced with 3-D and Relationship Analysis

Spotfire products have been at the forefront of data visualization and in-memory analysis. Spotfire 2.2 and Spotfire® Network Analytics take the Spotfire experience to a new level, unmatched by traditional BI.

Spotfire 2.2 introduces a third dimension to Spotfire visual analysis. Users analyzing complex multi-dimensional data users can zoom and rotate in three dimensions to analyze their data in a whole new way, and quickly spot new insights or hidden patterns.

Spotfire Network Analytics is a new product that complements Spotfire 2.2. It offers unique interactive visualizations of data relationships, allowing business professionals to see and explore the interesting network of relationships between data that is otherwise hidden. Spotfire Network Analytics can help in any type of relationship analysis, from identifying email or cell phone traffic patterns to perform social network analysis to analyzing counter-party or supply chain relationships.

“Comparing Spotfire to traditional BI is like comparing the World Wide Web to printed publications,” said Roger Oberg, vice president of Product Strategy for Spotfire products. “One is used to explore in an unstructured, self-directed, highly visual way that leads to new discoveries and insights. The other is used to distribute information already known. In times like these, there is a clear need to equip business professionals to see quickly what they could not see before. Spotfire 2.2 and Spotfire Network Analytics along with our recently acquired TIBCO Spotfire S+® products do exactly that – by turning complex data into useful, statistically informed, interactive visualizations for business professionals.”

Enterprise Extensibility

With the release of Spotfire 2.2, TIBCO announced the TIBCO Spotfire Technology Network http://stn.spotfire.com/stn/, an online resource that provides developers and technologists with information on how to begin using and take full advantage of the TIBCO Spotfire® Software Development Kit (SDK) and APIs to adapt the Spotfire platform to their businesses. The website offers articles, whitepapers and shared knowledge about how to customize applications for any business process, for users both within and outside the enterprise. The website also offers examples of how developers can begin integrating TIBCO Spotfire S+ and TIBCO Spotfire Miner™ with other Spotfire enterprise analytics products, enabling organizations to build powerful, statistically informed applications. The network was designed with the goal of helping IT workers and line of business developers automate analysis processes for business users, so they can put these users directly in the driver’s seat and eliminate the ‘build me a report’ syndrome.

Greater Performance and Scale

Enhancements to the platform improve its interactivity, response time and scalability. In particular, the TIBCO Spotfire® Web Player, which allows users within and outside companies to analyze data through a standard web browser, now accommodates more users on the same hardware. This is important, as more companies adopt browser-based applications for their extended workforce and partner networks.

“In the pharmaceuticals business, we deal with enormous volumes of data and hundreds of millions of rows. Spotfire is the versatile tool that we count on to make a difference across many functions. We could not draw insights as quickly and easily through other tools such as SAS or MS Access,” said Aaron Salamon, Segment Market Research Manager of Endo Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceutical company engaged in the research, development, sale and marketing of branded and generic prescription pharmaceuticals used primarily to treat and manage pain. “For marketing and payer analysis, Spotfire’s strengths in taking any data and uncovering crucial insights make it a ‘must-have’ for our team.”

How channels and the marketing communications plan are affected by customer communications management October 26, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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Marketers have never had so many tools at their disposal. The Marketing Communications Mix offers marketers a rich landscape in which to communicate. But then, there probably has never been so much competition.

The availability of so many marketing channels comes as both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because the ability to reach potential and existing customers with your message in an effective way that suits their preferences has never been more readily available.

The curse comes in managing channel effectiveness. In a previous article I identified up to 9 individual channels (I don’t discuss web presentment in this article) via which a marketer can establish a communications loop with their customers. Choose the wrong channel for a customer and they may never see your message. Herein lies the importance of understanding the merits of each channel. Herein also lies the importance of ensuring that the marketing communications plan is thought through carefully.

The advantages are that now, we have the technology to plan, execute and measure marketing performance across a myriad of customer communication channels.

So lets take a quick look at those nine channels:

Marketing Communications through Direct Mail

Direct mail is one of the oldest channels used by marketers and it remains effective but costly to deliver. It is costly to deliver because it is hungry both in terms of human resources and materials. Many consumers still prefer direct mail as a means of communication and within certain market segments it is likely to deliver some of the highest customer acquisition rates.

But it is also an area that is coming under pressure. People are questioning the environmental impact of Direct Mail and there is pressure to improve the impact of Direct Mail. Already, we see postal providers bringing in schemes that encourage direct mailers to work in a more friendly way.

New technology such as the advent and cost effectiveness of excellent digital colour printing technology through products such as the Xerox IGen mean that companies do not have to acquire masses of pre-printed materials to mail to their customers. The Igen, its smaller sisters and other printing products like it realise an opportunity to market through the direct mail channel in a more effective manner.

An example of how this could work could be a catalog clothing company. Today, most companies still send out catalogs on a one size fits all basis. So regardless of your sex, your age and the types of clothes that you buy from that company, the consumer still receives a catalog two inches thick that costs say $15 to produce. So if we add that up across 100,000 recipients alone, we are looking at $1.5m to send the catalog – and that’s just the unit cost of the catalog!

Now, through the integration and convergence of data, high speed, high quality variable colour printing technology and the ability for software to create infinitely variable communications, drawing on content management systems there is an opportunity to reduce costs whilst at the same time more effectively targeting the consumer. So, a man who is 55 and single is unlikely to be buying a skirt for himself, is unlikely to be interested in childrens clothes. Previous data demonstrates that that man typically buys suits from the company.

So instead of a 2 inch catalog, he receives a 5 page document that clearly and in detail promotes the suits that the company sells. The back page may refer to other product categories that you offer, but do not go into depth on them and these are irrelevant to this consumer except perhaps when he buys a relations child a birthday present.

The difference is that your company has demonstrated that it understands what the customer wants. The customer will like this. The other difference is that the $15 production cost for the old catalog has now reduced to a $4 cost. If this applies across 15,000 of those recipients, we have saved ourselves $165,000. If a company is delivering many direct mail campaigns, it seems clear that the benefits of building the one to one production capability are profound.

In the context of the marketing communications plan, it is unlikely that direct mail will fall by the wayside. Simply because consumers are used to it and know how to work with it. It is low pressure selling but its physical presence in homes and workplaces give it a persistence that no other media can offer.

(more…)

Customer Communications Management brings new factors to the marketing communications plan October 25, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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In delivering a customer communications management system, there are extra considerations in respect of the development of a marketing communications plan.

The marketing communications plan can provide a clear guideline as to how to execute, the expected costs and the expected return. Customer communications management will increase the ease with which a multi-channel marketing communications strategy can be executed. It will also increase the sophistication with which a company can communicate in a relevant manner with its customers.

In the context of discussing the plan I will use Philip Kotler ‘P’s framework as this is the standard study for virtually all marketers.

First off, lets establish the Four P’s of product marketing:

  • Product – Which products are you looking to promote? Today’s customer communications management platforms mean that you can market more than one product in an individual campaign based upon an individual users profile. Therefore Product Range Selection is an additional component in the customer communications management driven marketing communications plan.
  • Price – Are you making a promotional offer, or are you marketing on a recommend retail price basis? Are you proposing other kinds of incentives? Are you going to segment your customer base and perform propensity to buy analysis that delivers unique offers to each customer? In other words, price elasticity is available in your campaign should you choose to use it.
  • Place – Customer communications management processes give the marketing communications plan complete freedom to choose from a wide range of communications methods. These include voice, Direct Mail, Transactional Mail, Email, Social Media oriented email, social media direct, SMS, mobile and web. Therefore channel flexibility is a key advantage for the marketing communications plan.
  • Promotion – Specifically what is your promotion and what are the promotion objectives? To garner new customers? To market more to your existing customers? To raise awareness of a product launch? To build brand appeal through a news advisory about your companies efforts in the community? To raise funds for a charity that your company sponsors? The options are wide and varied. The key thing to note again here is that with an integrated customer communications platform, you will have promotion flexibility.

I’ve highlighted four key phrases here that I feel should now be implemented within the marketing communications plan. Lets review these individually.

Product Range

A good customer communications infrastructure will provide significant data analysis and extraction capabilities. A good propensity to purchase analysis model will allow not just a single product to be promoted to an individual customer but, a range of relevant products that will appeal. Remember that each customer can be communicated with on a genuine one – one basis. Therefore rather the scope of products that you wish to promote should be considered – They may not be in the same category but you may desire to push certain products in certain categories harder.

Price Elasticity

Not all customers are born the same. The data analysis process within customer communications management will allow you to build price elasticity into your marketing communications plan. You may know for example that keener customers may only buy when a promotional offer is in place. Other customers may buy only when the product is the newest item available. The marketing communications plan may need to consider price elasticity and the targeting of offers on a one to one or customer segment basis.

Channel Flexibility

The ability to deliver a standard but relevant  message, in a synchronised way to virtually any customer communication channel has always been a holy grail. My list reveals 9 communication channels here.

Whilst this level of flexibility is new in the market, I can see that the next few years will reveal much interesting data about the use of these channels and their performance in different customer and product segments. The ability to analyse the performance of campaigns using data from a single system is a new feature that works in support of the marketing communications plan.

Never before have companies had such a choice of communications channels combined with the ability to manage them effectively. The next decade is going to offer some very interesting insights in communications channels and their relevance in different market segments.

Promotion Flexibility

Promotions can be designed on a one to one basis. They can now be wide and varied and can target an individual consumer through her preferred channel of communication. Thus we might know that one consumer always buys two identical items when he orders. This might make the occasional 2 for 1 offer a big loyalty builder. Another customer may be very price sensitive thus a 30% discount may bring you that customers loyalty and an additional sale.

We can now communicate all elements of the four p’s in an entirely new manner, it is scope of elasticity and flexibility that needs to be managed and contained within the marketing plan. I feel that the power and return of the marketing campaign is likely to see exponential improvement.

I hope that this article has been interesting. Next time I discuss the marketing communications plan in context with customer communications managemet, I’ll talk about measurement and the feedback loop.

Pitney Bowes Introduces Map Extreme September 25, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in geocoding, group 1 software, location intelligence software, mapextreme, mapinfo, pitney bowes.
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Pitney Bowes continues is push for domination with the introduction of it’s latest .NET generation of MapExtreme custom mapping and location intelligence solutions. At the upper end, this is mapping software is a key driver of outbound document processes because it is location specific intelligence that will drive the promotional cycle.

Pitney Bowes Introduces MapExtreme