While marketers understand that providing the right products, services and information
to the right channels at the right time is paramount to the survival of their business, they
lack the systems, processes, technologies and resources to do this at an optimal level. Effective orchestration of product launches and marketing campaigns across the entire sales, distribution, merchandising and customer support repertoire requires significant logistical, technological and operational expertise. This involves new skills, knowledge, tools and analyses to optimise the marketing supply chain for marketing content and materials.

In many cases the US is a couple of years ahead on Europa when it concerns new trends and developments. As is the case for Marketing Supply Chain management. So what can we expect in this area? De CMO Council, a global organisation by and for CMO’s (Chief Marketing Officers), has a number of knowledge centres, of which the “Marketing Supply Chain” Institute. a dedicated knowledge centre focused on benchmark studies, cost audits and competency assessments, content aggregation, report publication and syndication, peer-to-peer interactions, best practice development, vertical industry analytics, and global models and frameworks for strategic sourcing and supplier management.

In 2010 the CMO Council conducted a global study combining a series of best practice interviews with a comprehensive demand chain performance audit to address how well marketing content and consumables are delivered to the front line and how much this impacts sales effectiveness, revenue generation and customer retention.

The results of the study reveal that marketers acknowledge significant
deficiencies in their overall marketing and sales effectiveness through the demand chain. New levels of Demand Chain Performance are clearly required for agile and adaptive organizations to drive sales effectiveness and enhance the point-of-sale experience.
This calls for a new perspective: the Marketing Supply Chain. We define this as:

“the ‘marketing supply chain’ is the recurring process of the development, production and cross media distribution of marketing content and materials”

Marketers are being confronted with CEO-driven mandates to achieve significant revenue growth from effective demand generation strategies. This key marketing imperative has come coupled with increased scrutiny of the yield and accountability of marketing and sales spend.

Applying visibility and measurement into the distribution of demand generation materials has largely been focused on the start-point of the engagement, namely the development and creation of content, design and strategy. Once this creative process is in place and the strategy has been approved, marketers leave the distribution and fulfillment required for the connection between content and customer to other operational functions, such as logistics (offline), ICT (online) or with the creative agency.

While fulfillment and delivery – both online and off – is the point at which strategy meets audience. No matter the strategy, creative or brilliance demonstrated on paper, if marketers fail to map, track, measure and improve this engagement, then customers will simply not see, experience or react to demand generating programs and materials.

There is a clear disconnect in demand chain performance as marketers focus process improvements on the development of strategy and creative, and then measure the impact of materials once they are distributed and in the customer’s hands. Yet there is little concentration on how these critical business-driving materials are actually fulfilled and distributed to customers, channel and business partners. And the pressure is only increasing for on-time and relevant communication and the latest information.

The research reflects that 80% of senior marketers feel their organization is not efficient or effective enough in go-to-market capabilities and efficiencies relative to provisioning all the elements of the marketing supply chain.

50% regards the inefficiency not enough reason yet to move the issue to the top of their priorities.

27% point to insufficient human resources and internal expertise as a key factor inhibiting success in the demand chain. 26% doesn’t have the management information to identify if and where improvements are required.

21% say they could improve in these areas by using outsourced providers with domain expertise to help with the load. But when you consider that this complex network of loosely strung vendors and outsourced execution partners has helped create the “status quo” in the supply chain performance, it stands to reason that a more strategic view should be taken.

68 % admit to having ordered marketing materials stressfully and under time pressure. A lack of strategic selection of partners and suppliers is part of the problem in an inefficient supply chain. Most of the time, vendor selection takes place of individual parts rather than on supply chain segments.

While this best-of-breed approach may be most effective in sourcing point solutions from vendors, it may not be in the best interest of overall demand chain performance. Without a structured approach and strategy towards vendor and partner selection, companies may encounter kinks in the demand chain as disparate and unintegrated systems or parties fail to provide the necessary operational efficiencies.

In 51 % obsolete materials are still being sent out to deliver the requested information. Why?

61% can point to their printer or agency for not having the materials ready in time for launch. Or, the company didn’t want to waste the materials, so before new, fresh and relevant material can be ordered, they would use every last piece of the old, out-dated brochures first.

23% of marketers simply did not know that the old material was sent. They only found out as customers fed back that the information they had received was out of date. In many cases fulfilment takes place outside the marketer’s visibility and there is no online availability of marketing stocks and out-of-stock items.

This is inconsistent with the fact that 82 % of respondents agree that the delivery of fresh content is absolutely critical to their strategy, with content hitting customer or prospect hands being the most up to date product and company information, or at least at product launch.

This research shows that there still is a lot to gain in optimizing the marketing supply chain. As the complexity and speed of cross media marketing communications increases, an efficient marketing supply chain becomes a prerequisite for CMO’s. The question is how much longer an inefficient marketing supply chain is ignored, before the CMO acknowledges it as a key strategic priority.