Oxford College of Marketing

Professional Services Marketing 

Written by Adele Jacques – Post Graduate Student at Oxford College of Marketing

 

One of our directors tells a story of a consultancy he worked at in the 70s. Once a year, they would hire a yacht in the Caribbean and send out the message that XYZ  consultancy were open for business.

 

For me, that encapsulates marketing professional services. Consultants expect the phone to ring. Unfortunately the world has changed significantly over the last four decades but I suspect this attitude has remained the same and there’s a large percentage of consultants’ heart still on that yacht.

 

There are Jamaican engineers now, everyone offers traffic surveys and Transport for London are forever furrowing their brows at consultant’s invoices. It’s time to wake up and smell the banana groves.

 

Professional service marketers are constantly battling internally before they even get to worrying about their clients. Marketing and sales are dirty words which “professionals” would rather not sully themselves with.

 

So what’s a professional services marketer to do? A few survival tips from the jungle:

 

Respeck!

Marketing is a profession just like any other and CIM has worked hard to set up robust qualifications and CPD to demonstrate this. The highly educated respect the highly educated so get your qualifications and focus on CPD. Then you need to do what we’ve been trained to do and show every single day the value you add.

 

CRM

Your internal clients are your clients, treat them like they are. Go and see them, talk about and understand them and their markets and come up with ways together to promote them together. And keep doing it, my desk is generally three people deep and if it’s not it’s probably because I’m out seeing someone.

 

Nagging is ok, rudeness isn’t

Technical staff will always have an excuse they didn’t do what they said they were going to. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve sat by someone’s desk until they’ve given me what I need. But I don’t go in like a snorting bull, destroying all the time I’ve spent building relationships. My approach depends who you’re talking to (that’s where your CRM comes in) but I’ve listened to their issues with their boss, tutted at them and sat myself at their desk passive aggressive style. Point is, I’ve got the job done and once someone’s realised it’s easier to do what you’ve asked your job gets easier. That’s why you need to be so sure your objectives are sound so you’re not wasting those precious billable hours.

 

Just because you have a hammer all your problems aren’t nails

Again, CRM, get to know people. Don’t set silly targets like everyone has to present at a conference. Some people will never be comfortable in that role so there’s no point in forcing them. It’s uncomfortable for them and potentially damaging for the company. Instead, spot who are your marketing stars in different fields and nurture those relationships.

 

PR me!

Don’t forget yourself. Ask for objectives. Yes, SMART ones! If you don’t get sensible ones set your own. Be obsessive about them and make sure everyone in the world knows about what you’ve done. The professional services marketing world isn’t a place for wallflowers. You can’t wait around for someone else to tell the world how great you are, you need to do it for yourself. That new signalised junction is always going to be more sexy than the seminar which brought in three new projects. Yes, I know.

 

Or, you can go back to being the “fluff and parties” department and dream of the yacht. It’s your call.

 

The Hidden Value of Intangible Assets

Oana Sav

Marketing Consultant and Student at Oxford College of Marketing 

 

The time of naïve coverage and advice on how not to miss the “opportunities” of the recession is over. Marketers in Romania should wake up and actually draw some business lessons out of the  variety of experiences shown in this time of scarce resources.  Marketing is still perceived as the glamorous part of the business, quite often reduced to branding or spectacular advertising campaigns,  remembered rather for their artistic touch,  and not for their support to the overall strategy of an organization.

 

K Tech used to be one of the biggest names in IT retail in Romania operating in an attractive industry with fast and high growth rates in all their markets, B2C and B2B. That was the  right time and the  right place to be: Romania, with increasing spending power and  constant increasing computers usage. K Techs business philosophy was almost unchanged since the beginning  when there were numerous small stores specializing in IT products. K Tech is now bankrupt with unpaid debts to banks and suppliers of over 15 mil. Euros. Two thirds of this debt is due to the borrowings from banks and the company has tried to pledge them by increasing stocks and thus doubling its debt value.

 

The case of K Tech is much to complex to analyse in this context. This  failure might yet very well  warn managers to think twice about undervaluing intangible assets such as market knowledge, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Ignoring to build strong marketing assets, not narrowed to glamorous things, like branding or advertising campaigns that simply generated awareness. Like many other companies during the last 10 years of constant growth, K Tech has focused on financial results and short term profits. Their network and their sales grew with the market with increasing consumer spending power but in a less complex competitive environment.

 

K Tech did invest in advertising and its brands enjoyed reasonable awareness. What K didn’t build and invest in,  while borrowing money to extend the business, was in aligning its internal processes and operations with its financial ambitions.

 

The trap of ignoring what Kaplan and Norton would call the “Learning and Growth Perspective”, their human capital, information and organization capital.

 

IT retail is about excellent customer service, well trained  vendors, sound MIS to cross-sell and up-sell , retaining customers and prevent lapsing contracts are especially  important  during  a recession. Ignoring this at the same time as loosing customer perspective meant that the  end was near.

 

Their customer perspective was  almost lost as they missed  understanding  the new context, changing consuming patterns and attitudes towards K Tech products.

 

What  market conditions specially changed for businesses like K Tech?  At least two essential C’s: customers and competition. For the customers, IT products become commodities that they no longer invested with as much value and they therefore bought elsewhere at a lower price  without the need for a specialized store. Hypermarkets started to dominate the Romanian retail scene and  more recently online stores have slowly taken the market from  former successful specialized IT stores that did almost nothing to maintain their competitive advantage.

 

There are three things to remember  from this one brief  lesson. Maintaining competitive advantage is a key to survival, not just a nice phrase. Advertising campaigns don’t stand for marketing strategy and successful strategies do not last forever.

 

Like it or not, marketing is a never ending job. And we need to remember that marketers  are here to:

Increase Shareholder Value

Increase Long term Cash Flows

Increase Brand and Corporate Reputation

Increase Competitive Advantage

 

Oana Sav

Marketing Consultant
more.marketing.solutions@gmail.com
www.marketingsolutions.ro

I am due to take a branch of a business to business office supplies company. Although at one point the company had a sales turnover near £5million, it went into decline and has stabilised at approx £1.5million.  

The managing director has invested heavily in IT, created the new role and recruited a group marketing manager and has appointed me to become the sales manager of the branch. All demonstrating his commitment to turn the branch around and to drive the organisation forward to becoming a leading independent dealership.  

My first three days are to be spent with the various board members and other managers to set the business plan or the strategy for the branch I am taking over. 

I wonder what questions, structures, models etc other college members would consider using to gain a best understanding of the business and assistance to produce the business plan?

jthomas@googlemail.com

I am going to give you one case concerning the edible oil market.

Generally, we have many-many interesting bits of news, but I will start with sunflower oil.

There are approximately 12 sunflower oil (sfo) brands in our market.

Usually, sfo is bought by women between 24-52 years old. Considering that our “Final” brand was the first brand entered to this market, a big share of this market belongs to us. However, as the globalization increases, and as the world environment changes, consumer behaviour changes as well. After some time, we found that the brand value of Final decreased and people were trying new unknown sunflower brands as well.

We then arranged a survey among potential edible oil buyers and found out that the contemporary population was open to using new brands and did not want to buy the old ones. Consumer surveys showed that people had a desire to buy Russian or Ukrainian brands, as the they thought that they were of a high quality. Imported brands are a little expensive due to the tax, custom, transport, buyer’s fee and etc issues.

Consumers think that if the product has a Russian name and price is high, the product is very good. So, taking into consideration all of these issues, we decided to introduce to the market a new product with a Russian name. Trust me, we regained our market share.

Another case is that at the end of 2008 a new competitor from Singapore entered the market with a different bottle and colour. Q1 survey of 2009 showed that the penetration and consumption of this product also increased. We organised a Focus Group among competitor users. The research showed that people buy that product, because its colour was different, it was darker than original corn oil products.

Considering this issue, we did the same, designed a new, more functional bottle, made its colour darker and launched it to the market. After 3 months this product achieved efficient sales in its category and put pressure on its competitor.

The above mentioned success does not only relate to the product’s specifications. We have also a strong distribution system, trained sales team, plant that meets high technology & international standards, professional research team and at least good marketing manager with CIM qualification.