Marketing is fluffy. Everybody knows that. Marketing departments live and die by their own creativity, some nuggets of received wisdom, a few well- established processes and a dash of luck.
The technology that marketing people use only reflects that fluffiness. Think of the utilitarian computer systems that govern payroll, accounting, manufacturing, the supply chain and the myriad other processes essential to running a business. Rigorously tested software that forces workers to jump through a series of hoops and allows managers to oversee their work at a glance.
Now think of the marketing department. They come to work. They open up their e-mail. They glance at a spreadsheet. They write documents in Word. Maybe they fiddle with a PowerPoint presentation. None of it fits together.
"Marketing is the last bastion of the enterprise not to have been really transformed by technology," says Mr Claudio Marcus, analyst at Gartner Group, the technology research company.
Manufacturing has enterprise resource planning, salespeople have salesforce automation and finance systems have been automated for decades - but marketing has stayed aloof.
Certainly, there are systems to aid marketers. New ways of gathering data gave rise to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, designed to pull together everything the company knows about you so that it can deal with you better when you contact it. But these do not automate the work of the marketing department. They are more likely to automate the lives of call-centre workers, who plug into CRM systems to be told how to handle particular calls and customers, and how to generate potential sales leads.
What is lacking has been a system that would take in each step of the marketing department's work - from the conception of a campaign to its execution and the follow-up measurements of its success - in the same way that an enterprise resource planning system can divide the making and distribution of a light bulb into all its constituent steps and track each one.
Can this even be done with marketing? Mr Chris Sykes, founder of marketing tools company Then, argues that it must be done because the present systems leave too much to chance.
At present, he says, "if a chief executive asks a marketing director for a detailed breakdown of costs and returns from a campaign from, say, last year, that director will go into a blind panic trying to amass the data from the agency, the department, the printers, all of the different sources. Marketing data is kept all over the place and when a campaign is over it's frequently just thrown out and they start work on the next one."
That haphazard approach can rob firms of their skills, adds Mr Bill Marjot, chief executive of the Delivery Partnership, which has implemented marketing resource management (MRM) systems.
"An awful lot of the knowledge of marketing departments stays in people's heads and leaves when they leave," he says.
Mr Fred Burt, director of BrandWizard, a division of Interbrand, calculates that marketing executives spend up to 60 per cent of their time on administration: "Automating that would free up their time for the more exciting parts of their jobs."
New software systems to automate marketing functions have appeared in the past 18 months or so. MRM systems combine elements of document management and work flow systems, which govern the distribution of tasks to relevant workers, and they tie into databases of market research or customer information. They generally comprise four parts: planning and budgeting; creating and developing marketing assets, such as TV ads and product logos; fulfilment and delivery of campaigns; and reporting on the success of campaigns.
MRM systems are catching on. Gartner has found 450 in use so far in the world's 1,000 biggest companies.
Mr Marcus says MRM systems can save money, boasting a return on investment of between 10 and 20 per cent in the first year, rising to between 20 and 85 per cent in the third year of deployment. He estimates that, by 2007, 35 per cent of marketing organisations with more than 200 employees will be using the software.
MRM systems may be in their infancy but the sector has already suffered its first casualty. Emmperative, set up in 2001, was a joint venture between Procter & Gamble (P&G) and a small internet company called Worldwide Magnifi, with backing from Accenture. It aimed to codify P&G's marketing processes in a software system for commercial sale. The venture lasted only 18 months. P&G declines to talk about Emmperative but says the project has been shelved.
P&G seems to have had trouble in selling the idea of MRM to its own people, who pride themselves on marketing prowess honed over more than a century. Will resistance from marketers themselves foil the software?
Ms Beth Hall is vice-president of support services at Abelson Taylor, an advertising agency in Chicago that is using MRM software. She says users are enthusiastic. "People have been champing at the bit to get on to it and they seem to like using it," she reports.
Ms Suzy Frith, chairwoman of PR firm Citigate Technology, has not tried MRM but is keen on the idea: "The marketing business is very process-orientated when you get down to it, so really it should be possible to automate it. It's common sense - and should save a lot of time and effort."
Mr Michael Doernberg, chief executive of MRM start-up SmartPath, believes MRM software requires a degree of customisation to individual clients. "You have to be very sensitive to the individual's needs because these processes are much more creative than something like manufacturing," he says.
To date, marketing has escaped automation because of the perception that it is a creative process which cannot be codified. So might software take the magic out of marketing?
No, says Ms Hall. "At the end of the day, it's still about creativity. But if software can help you with the everyday parts of the processes, you have more time to be creative." - (Financial Times Service)
