What is Enterprise Marketing Management and will it change the game?
Hunter Hastings is CEO and Co-Founder of the Enterprise Marketing Management Group, a firm dedicated to integrated demand process management.
David Hutchinson: So for starters, please share with us Hunter Hastings' up-to-the-minute definition of enterprise marketing management.
Hunter Hastings: Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) is the systematic management of the entire integrated demand process (marketing and sales). It takes its cue from the productivity revolution on the supply side that took place over the last 30 years, driven by a single unified enterprise supply chain vision. Enterprise marketing management combines marketing process engineering, robust and scientific measurement and customer-centric organization, and it enables them all via technology.
Hutchinson: Sounds a lot like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or the Integrated Marketing Communications principles advocated by IMC sages like Don E. Schultz. Is EMM somehow better or more germane to today's marketing centric organizations than these other, three letter acronyms?
Hastings: CRM and IMC are components of enterprise marketing management, but they are unable to help clients manage the entire demand generation system.
Enterprise marketing management helps clients: 1) generate insights (and understand the value of their insights portfolio), 2) advance from insights to brand domains and brand equity frameworks and innovation platforms, 3) to create long-term equity appreciation plans and annual marketing plans, and 4) to implement those plans effectively as well as measuring their performance accurately for continuous improvement.
The magic of supply-side optimization is that supply-siders figured out how to optimize for the entire system. The magic of enterprise marketing management lies in the same secret: it's a holistic management system, not a component view.
Hutchinson: So tell us about the EMM Group. Where "EMM" companies like Unica seem to be more about enterprise software, your company advocates the use of software, but only as a support system for leveraging customer insights, which, if done correctly, seem ultimately to be about crafting and refining internal processes to increase brand equity. Fair?
Hastings: Right on. Enterprise marketing management is process + metrics + organization + technology. You can't apply the technology until the process is in place (that's one of the lessons of the supply-side revolution: it's dangerous to automate a bad process).
Sound marketing process begins with customer insights (at EMM Group, we have an insights generation process). These insights are turned into innovation, and the innovation is delivered to customers via the go-to-market process. Brand building (a term we believe applies to both B2C and B2B marketing) is another process.
All of these processes should be captured and turned into standards; the roles and responsibilities of the organization should be defined to implement the processes effectively. And the metrics of the process and their outcomes must be defined. Only then does it make sense to apply technology: software embeds the process and puts it on everyone's desktop so that they can follow it, collaborate around it and implement it.