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  • Focusing on Recruitment

    Focusing on Recruitment

    This week, I’ve welcomed aboard a recruitment manager at ITG – our first person wholly dedicated to this task. In the past, recruitment has been handled by individual department heads in consultation with HR.

    There was nothing wrong with this system, but we’ve experienced such strong growth in the recent past that I felt we needed a dedicated resource to handle it.

    In the past six months, we’ve taken on another 91 employees, while we’ve also bought an eCRM company, ITG Creator, which gave us an additional 125 staff (and growing).

    Increasing automation

    We now employ over 530 people – and are growing fast. The reason is that we appear to be reaching the tipping point when it comes to marketing automation.

    Marketing departments have been talking about it for years – and many have dabbled with asset management software or otherwise dipped their toe in the digital ocean.

    More pioneering companies have embraced it wholeheartedly, including of course many of our long-term clients, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Puma, Heineken and Renault.

    The reason is simple – the marketing landscape is getting just too complex to manage with manual processes such as Excel and emails.

    Advantages of MRM

    Marketing automation not only increases the speed and efficiency of your activity, it gives you full visibility of your operation, making you more agile and helping inform future marketing plans.

    It also joins up different areas of your operation, including artwork creation, asset management, campaign planning and stock management. All of these are easily handled through our Media Centre MRM platform.

    But because we don’t just sell software ¬– we provide a full range of marketing support services, including artwork creation, print management and strategic and creative strategy – every new client means a new account team.

    Hence the need for a dedicated recruitment manager to seek out the best people possible to fill these teams. It doesn’t matter how good your technology, or how extensive your services, if you don’t have people with the right knowledge (and above all, the right passion for customer service), you’re not going to give your clients the level of service they deserve.

    Until next time

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • It’s good to talk

    It’s good to talk

    The most successful businesses are those with the most open employee communications. Simon Ward explains how you can strengthen staff engagement and morale as your business grows through a comprehensive internal comms strategy.

    It’s good to talk

    A flat hierarchy with good communication across the organisation is easy to manage when you’re a small company. And it’s desirable. Morale and work output suffer when you feel you’re being treated like a mushroom.

    The difficulty comes when your organisation grows. As you increase in size – and expand across various sites – regular on-site team meetings become unwieldy and impractical. It’s easy for operations to silo and people to become blinkered to what’s happening outside their immediate environment.
    We’ve grown from a few dozen people five years ago to over 550 people now. A lot of this expansion has been in the past two years, and it was clear the existing internal comms strategy would soon become woefully inadequate.

    We’ve found there isn’t one single way of cultivating engagement and ensuring knowledge is shared: we have to use multiple channels to ensure no-one is missed. There are the obvious, of course: social media team pages where account members share ideas that motivate others; various cross-site social and sporting activities, which help to break down silos.
    But we’ve also recently introduced the idea of largescreen videoconferencing across the entire organisation, where everyone can question me directly about the direction the company and put forward suggestions.

    We’ve also launched a rewards portal that features benefits and more light-hearted communicatons about the business (two-thirds of employees signed up on the first day). We also join schemes that enable employees from different departments to spend a day on joint charity projects.

    I’m also told we’re about to run an inter-site Mario Kart tournament over the net.

    The ideal is that the employee-run channels inspire constant willing engagement, but peaks and troughs are inevitable. Therefore, the channels have to be managed. We’ve recently expanded our comms team, and they work very closely with HR to ensure that all activity is working to inform and inspire those about areas of the company they’re not directly involved in.
    As we continue to grow, the challenge will only become greater. But the key is never to let up and ensure internal comms remains a constant priority.”

    Until next time

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • When Marketers are not Marketers

    When Marketers are not Marketers

    Keep creativity alive in a world of distraction

    “Yes, I’m a marketing manager, but really I’m a project manager… I just don’t have the resource to be creative.”

    I heard this comment from an audience member at a recent round table event hosted by The Drum, where I was invited to sit on the panel.

    The title of the event was “When Marketers are not Marketers”, and joining me at the table were senior marketers from M&S, SABMiller and the IAB.

    We all agreed that strong creativity leads to positive results in marketing, but we had to acknowledge that the time marketers have to be creative is severely restricted by the additional admin, procurement and reporting responsibilities that are increasingly piled on them.

    The challenge for marketers, as Tina Kataria, SABMiller’s global category manager for agency sourcing, so succinctly put it, is to “keep creativity alive in a world of distraction.”

    Improving the value of marketing

    And these distractions are multiplying, driven by more digital channels, increasing accountability and ever-rising budgetary pressure. These budgetary pressures can lead to demands for cost cutting, which can be disastrous if not tied to increases in efficiency and improvements in the value of marketing activity.

    There can be other fall-out too. As the IAB’s Steve Chester said, “cost-cutting can mean agency margins being squeezed, often leading to bad creative and driving down value.”
    Adding to these issues, traditional notions of customer engagement and loyalty have been blown out of the water.

    “Customers are indifferent,” said fellow panellist Richard Jones, head of design and production at M&S. “That is the job marketing has to deal with.”

    Overcoming this indifference and building brand engagement means devoting more time to creative strategy and customer engagement, not less. And this means reclaiming time and resource for creative thinking by reducing the admin burden.

    So that’s the conundrum we discussed at length: how to increase creativity in the face of demands for greater efficiency and value, and the avalanche of admin and process. It’s a problem I encounter all the time, and fortunately it does have a solution.

    Technology is key

    Many of the time-consuming tasks that are taking marketers away from addressing the urgent needs of creatively encouraging customer engagement – managing campaigns, suppliers, assets, briefing, approvals – can be handed over to technology.

    The panel had a very interesting discussion on the difference between those in marketing who understand the value of technology and those who don’t.

    Technology impacts everyone in business, because it’s where the savings lie. The right marketing automation achieves the double hit of freeing up your time to focus on creativity – most likely why you got into the job in the first place – and delivering those cost savings demanded by the board.

    Joined-up marketing

    A joined-up approach to marketing operations that embraces technology can deliver hard savings through better and more transparent briefings and approvals, reducing reworks and delivery time.
    It can provide improved adherence to CPAs, enabling you to do more in the time available, as well as providing the obvious major time and efficiency improvements by banishing spreadsheets and manual ways of working.

    You’ll see a reduction in emails for each job, and savings from reduced reliance on freelance resource.

    Efficient automated workflows give you the extra time you need to properly plan and develop strategy, while the visibility technology can provide of your entire operation enables you to measure campaign effectiveness to facilitate better planning and budget allocation.

    We concluded that there are, in effect, two streams to marketing: ideas-driven marketing and data-driven marketing.

    The first relies on good people with inspirational ideas, good instincts and, crucially, the time required to develop creative strategies and put them into effect.

    The second provides the operation efficiency, value and reporting required, but it is time-consuming unless supported by the right technology – technology that frees up time for the ideas-driven marketing that can overcome consumer indifference.

    Perhaps when all companies take this approach, we’ll be able to come back to the Drum for an event entitled “When Marketers ARE Marketers”. I look forward to the day.

    Until next time…

    Simon Ward

    You can read The Drum’s write up of the event.

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • Making Local Marketing Work

    Making Local Marketing Work

    Simon Ward explains how, by using Media Centre and SP, Inspired Thinking Group has solved the conundrum of local marketing.

    As your company grows, and operations silo, having a complete view of your marketing activity becomes increasingly difficult. You may find ways of running a slick national marketing operation, but what about your local outlets?

    Local stores make up large retailers’ bricks and mortar frontline, and progressive companies are finding that investing a bigger part of their budget in local marketing can reap enormous benefits: basing campaigns on local knowledge of customer demographics and preferences can deliver big ROI rewards.

    The downside is you can lose visibility and control. Keeping your national activity joined up is tough enough, but how do you ensure your local managers come up with intelligent local marketing strategies and produce only on-brand assets?

    Added to that, where are your local managers going to find the time to run a multichannel marketing campaign? They’re too busy trying to run a shop. This is the conundrum: if the only way you can get local marketing to work is to put in huge amounts of resource from central marketing, you might as well go back to a one-size-fits-all national strategy.

    Making local marketing work

    Over the years, Inspired Thinking Group has had a lot of time to work out how to unravel this knot. We work with brands that have large retail outlets – including car manufacturers Renault and SKODA – and those with smaller outlets, such as Weight Watchers, whose local leaders and meetings we support.

    In every case, we have helped devise local marketing programmes that increase local footfall and sales, use guaranteed compliant assets and give complete visibility to the central team. As a bonus, local managers report increasing satisfaction with national marketing support as the programme matures.

    How have we done it?

    Key factors in local marketing success

    Neither technology nor local marketing expertise on their own can unravel this knot. Both are required – and they have to work seamlessly together.

    First, the technology. Local and national operations need a simple-to-use platform that stores all assets and can be viewed by all required parties. The software needs to be able to schedule campaigns, keep track of budgets and handle bespoke requests.

    In 2010, we found exactly the software we needed in Media Centre by Total Marketing Services. Media Centre is an advanced marketing resource management platform built around core modules – Asset Library, Local Marketing, Workflow Manager, and so on – so marketers only need to invest in the functionality they need.

    We were so impressed, we – sorry about the cliché – but we bought the company.

    Six years of development later, Media Centre now sits at the heart of many of our clients’ marketing operations, with the Local Marketing module providing the means for local managers to run geographically relevant, compliant campaigns, with full visibility for central marketing.

    Our Status Pro (SP) reporting app provides realtime campaign data on any desktop or mobile browser, combining Media Centre data with information from numerous other sources, including Google Analytics and social media activity, providing the ability for central marketing to drill down into the data to a granular level.

    Central marketing creates and constantly updates a comprehensive suite of multichannel local templates that reflect national assets. These are stored in the client’s Asset Library and can be accessed through any browser. Every local manager can view, resize, amend and order any of the templated assets.

    Service support

    With the technology in place, the next thing is to look at service support. Local managers may not have the time or marketing expertise to run brilliant campaigns, so we provide expert local consultants who research the location, study the results of previous campaigns and recommend channel strategies for each outlet.

    To ensure local executions are inexpensive, we also provide a Dynamic Template module in Media Centre that enables easy customisation of templated artwork directly through the browser. We also run a 24/7 artworking studio, dedicated to producing bespoke customisations of on-brand assets.

    Our QC team ensures compliance of bespoke artworks, and all briefing, approvals, bookings and requests for quotes are handled through Media Centre.

    An ITG account manager or account team works full time at the client’s head office, and is the first point of contact for all Media Centre and local marketing activity.

    The result is a constantly innovating local marketing programme that provides increased ROI, is on-brand, and mirrors national executions. With the extra advantage that it requires no painful admin input from either local managers or national marketers, enabling them to spend their time doing what they do best – developing creative marketing campaigns or running stores.

    Read our Renault local marketing case study here

    Until next time,

    Simon Ward


    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • A day is a long time in technology

    A day is a long time in technology

    Simon Ward explains how a day can make a big difference to marketers – especially when it’s dedicated to innovation.

    I’ve always been immersed in technology. As CEO of SP Group’s digital arm, I was at the cutting edge of what was on the face of it a very traditional industry – printing.

    At ITG, our core offering is based around automation technology, and we’ve just taken our first steps into the big data arena, with our recent addition of ITG Creator.

    But even people who run technology companies can struggle to keep up with every development – the time investment can be daunting, especially as not every invention will make it off the drawing board.

    Pace of change in technology

    It took decades for telephones to reach 50% of the population. It took five years for mobiles to achieve the same penetration. Innovation is not only getting faster, so is its adoption.

    Companies with a competitive technology edge are better placed to attract customers than those who are baffled by technology. But there are so many areas of innovation out there, how is a marketer to find the time to keep up with them all?

    We decided to help.

    Over the past week, our offices have been teaming with clients. This was an innovation for us – generally we only entertain one or two clients at a time. However, over 140 clients, most of them marketers, visited our offices together, but it wasn’t just to see us. We’d invited some guests.

    An appetite for innovation

    Augmented reality, 3D printing, virtual reality, 360 degree cameras, interactive video, HyperSound technology – there are a huge number of technologies designed to improve retail customer engagement. We sought out the best, and invited their keepers to demo them for our clients.

    Marketers from Heineken, Puma, Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury’s and numerous other retailers and brands moved from area to area, scrutinising innovation after innovation, interrogating the technology, and putting faces to buzzwords.

    It’s not the most obvious tactic for a technology company, to showcase other people’s products alongside your own. But building a partnership with your clients is about more than simply selling your wares – it involves providing added value, just as they aim to give added value to their customers.

    It was an exceptionally successful day, eliciting numerous positive comments. But perhaps the most satisfying were from those who said, “I knew about this technology, but until I saw the demo I didn’t realise it was for us.”

    This shows that even marketers who keep up with technological innovations rarely have the time to delve deeply enough to see all the angles. Even when you attend technology exhibitions, you often spend a lot longer tracking down items of interest than you do experiencing the innovations.

    A single day spent looking at a dozen specially selected technologies, with the ability to question experts in a relaxed and engaging environment, can give you a significant catch-up.

    It’s certainly something we’ll be doing again.

    Until next time

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • Inspired Thinking Group to manage intu’s print and procurement

    Inspired Thinking Group to manage intu’s print and procurement

    Engineering your supply chain

    I’m extremely pleased to announce that Inspired Thinking Group has been appointed to manage the print procurement of shopping centre manager and owner, intu. We manage all the print for a lot of big companies now, and if it’s not too immodest to say so, we do it rather well.

    There’s no magic to it, of course (although employing a team of top-notch print experts is a good starting point), but to mark this new partnership with intu, I thought it might be a good idea to share one or two pointers on how to get the best from your print supply chain.

    This is one the biggest bugbears facing marketers today. When you have to produce hundreds of thousands of posters, leaflets and the panoply of POS, the last thing you have time for is selecting the best possible printer for every job.

    Instead, the temptation is to fall back on the one or two tried-and-tested suppliers you’ve worked with for years: they know your products after all, and they’ve pushed out the boat on a number of occasions to get the job done, and well… you probably feel a bit disloyal looking at other options.

    Loyalty is a good thing. You want good relations with your suppliers. Not only is it good for business, but we’re all human. Much more satisfying to run a successful business and be nice to your suppliers. I’ll return to the topic of loyalty at the end of this blog.

    At the same time, one of your favourite printers might be excellent at one kind of work, but not be properly set up for another. Out there, there’s probably another printer who has the exact equipment you need for that specific job, and who can turn it around more quickly, at a higher quality and a better price.

    When you’re spending millions on print, even a slight re-engineering of your supply chain can shave a significant slice off your marketing budget. And that’s where we come in.

    The first factor in our success is an incredibly well-engineered supply chain. We don’t own any printers, which means we don’t have to give work to our own people just to keep the presses busy. Instead, we audit printers in our supply chain thoroughly and regularly, advising them on how to upgrade their equipment and practices to make them more competitive. At the same time, we get to know exactly what kinds of job they are best at, and which they aren’t.

    This means that when any job comes in, we immediately know the four or five printers who will provide the highest quality work and turn the job around in the required time. Now comes the second factor: competitive tension.

    We cherry-pick the four or five best printers for each job and send them an RFQ (request for quote). This is a completely automated process run through our Media Centre platform, so we always have a record of every quote we’ve ever received for every kind of job.

    When the selected printers supply their quote, we can choose the best price, knowing full well that we’ve not only scored on quality, turnaround time and suitability, we’re also paying the lowest price for the job (the amount of work we can place generally guarantees a highly competitive quote).

    Over hundreds, or even thousands of jobs, these relatively small cost saving can amount to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pounds – far more than it costs for the dedicated account managers we install alongside your marketing department to take the print burden off you.

    And there’s another bonus too (I said I’d come back to loyalty). If you feel a bit bad about moving work from your favoured suppliers to a new, efficiently engineered supply chain, we have an answer for that too.

    Often, these legacy printers need upskilling and uptooling to get them up to scratch. We frequently help with that process, advising them how to step up to the level required to join our roster of approved printers. In the long run, they may even get more work for our other clients than the work they lose from you.

    It’s not often in business that everyone can be a winner, but it’s very satisfying when it happens.

    Until next time…

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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