Building Efficient and Consistent Marketing

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1 Building Efficient and Consistent Marketing This document sets out to help senior managers understand the key steps that need to be taken to achieve consistency and efficiency in package labelling what the challenges are, what some of the solutions might look like, and the impact of the rise of technology and metric-driven Marketing Operations on the process. The material is based on the experience of Kallik in helping customers secure their packaging integrity and brand identity in the consumer and regulated industries.

2 1. Change Is In The Air: The Market Context Of More Efficient Marketing Industries of all types, in all kinds of both global and local markets, face increasing pressure to use a wide range of communication channels, both print and digital. But the rise of use of the Internet and other digital delivery media has also brought in another pressure: not to simply produce creative messages and brand collateral for the market, but to closely track their reception and impact. Of course, it s actually a huge opportunity, too. As marketing increasingly becomes less of an art and more of a science as in, a field characterised by the use of metrics to quantify in a fine-grained manner what the deliverables of a campaign are the business is in a far better position to gauge the specific pound, euro and dollar profile of its marketing outreach. The CEO has stopped being impressed by the colours on the logo or the imagery in the Q4 ad campaign, in other words and is now more focused on fact-based proof points of the campaign. Welcome to the new era of Operational Management or Marketing Operations ( Marketing_operations). There are job roles springing into existence that simply didn t exist five years ago, based on marketing professionals using IT to achieve control of processes. Investment is also taking place in better tools - from Google Analytics on - that can be used by this new generation of Marketing Operations experts to help improve processes and derive more visibility into the Marketing Department s actions. The net result is to make Marketing much more accountable to the organisation. And in parallel, there is an increasing natural linkage between the drive to achieve consistency and efficiency in Product Marketing and the drive to achieve equivalent consistency and performance breakthroughs in branding, artwork and labelling.

3 2. From Pens To Medical Devices: Why Data Is Central To Marketing Operations Everywhere This doesn t mean we have stopped being interested in creativity but we are interested in fusing that creativity with dependable, repeatable processes and metrics to make sure it has the chance to deliver maximum impact all the way down the supply chain delivering to the business highly granular, detailed perspectives on what is working where, and why. Data is central to this shift, which is itself fueled by increased use of digital tools and services by the consumer as they access information and shop in cyberspace. An added complication is that as we strive to be more data-driven across different communication channels, inconsistency in messaging across those different communication channels is becoming more and more of a risk. That s always been potentially a peril in regulated industries. But now it s starting to be true in multiple sectors. When people take note of the nutritional label on something as basic as a chocolate bar, it s paramount that what is printed there always matches what is published online or what a customer in a different geography might buy from a store later that day. But if marketing is getting more formalised and quantifiable in mainstream business, imagine how much more weight this change has in the regulated sector. After all, in those industries the stress on auditing is always the number one job. While there is no question that a manufacturer of pens, say, will be just as interested in achieving an efficient and consistent Marketing Operations; nonetheless, for their regulated peers, the same drive to operational efficiency is joined by the need to keep the compliance dragon at the castle gate. What s more, in parallel with this basic evolution in the shape of marketing, global regulation and legislation changes are affecting the market environment and in radical ways. In sectors as diverse as the chemical, pharmaceutical, tobacco, cosmetics and medical devices industries, regulation is becoming more and more of a factor. Another shift: the kinds of customers (QA and Regulatory Affairs teams) Kallik has been helping in regulated industries are getting increasingly interested in Marketing Operations. What can bring Marketing and Regulatory Affairs teams together in the most fruitful way: the better use of product data.

4 3. Motivation Factors: Why Do We Want To Do This Again? How are the marketing teams in regulated industries starting to wake up to the potential of a modern business software to manage their artwork requirements? Driven by an interest in sharpening up their measurement of their marketing activities and the increase in global regulation/compliance, marketing professionals need to look for consistency and efficiency in their processes, as much as their colleagues have been doing in product labelling for some time. They are looking for ways to: Save time Avoid duplication and all wheel reinvention initiatives Share and reuse what works across their organisations while still being able to immediately tailor, in an error-free way, for local conditions Log a full audit trail of changes to any work to help transparency, consistency and auditability Tighten the approvals process to ensure accountability and security. If you can do all this for packaging and labelling, there is absolutely no reason at all why you cannot also do it for brochures, leaflets, information sheets and all the other marketing collateral. And just like when your colleagues use artwork management software to ensure consistency and full compliance with regulations for labelling content, regulated industry marketing teams are realising that all artwork changes will have justification and evidence for any alterations through the supply chain vital for auditing purposes. In practical terms, that means any product claims you make in your literature can be defended and sourced to, say, the US Federal and Drug Administration or any other external third party from the cosmetics you market, to the new health food you want to offer, to the free from statement for your colour dye, to that innovative new medical device you have in R&D. So if you want to make sure your marketing collateral is fully tracked, accessible, signed off, and connected to a real audit trail, look to modern artwork management software to help you a step that will also get you one important step closer the whole Operational Marketing vision.

5 4. A Journey Of A Thousand Miles: Take The Data Are we claiming that no one s been taking these steps until now? Not at all: multi-nationals have been pushing for this level of control for some time. The problem is that organisations have tended to use point solutions usually some combination of one or two products (e.g. an asset database) and a lot of Excel (or increasingly now, SharePoint). This is often quite a brittle set up it isn t integrated and it scales poorly but most seriously, it doesn t have the heritage, depth and expertise a dedicated labelling and artwork management solution has. That s to say, it hasn t been battletested as the latter will have been by so many years in field operations in regulated (labelling and artwork) industry work. The key is to find powerful, responsive software that uses a data-centric approach to labeling creation and management, which can save a phenomenal amount of time and cost, as well as driving up accuracy, transparency and compliance. This is because you only ever work from a single, authorised instance of, for example, a safety data sheet, or one master database containing all of the latest authorised labelling assets. That gives your team the ability to automatically track all related translations, in order that you can confidently and efficiently reuse approved labelling components as needed. One example of what that means at the coal face is slick and cost-effective translation management. Most customers know that a French version for Canada needs to be different from the one offered in Francophone Africa let alone for the Paris or Swiss markets. That s in order to reflect the reality of local trading conditions, but also local regulation and compliance factors too. That s as true for your marketing collateral for the product as it is for the packaging and labelling. Now consider how useful it would be to look in a central repository to identify not just the right language translation of a promotion but one that has already been safely calibrated to reflect those compliance issues; a resource that immediately enables the team to get straight on to the important job of building promotional campaigns around it and, via their new Marketing Operations capabilities, tracking the return from that activity. The verdict s clear: marketing teams in regulated industry organisations need to start using a data-centric approach to support the effective introduction of a Marketing Operations oriented, data-driven regime. That s because doing so will offer them the same kinds of quantifiable benefits that their colleagues in Q&A or Regulatory Affairs have been profiting from for some time. This is tremendous news for Marketing teams from customers in the regulated industries who finally have a market-proven tool to ease their transition to the data and process intensive Marketing Operations world that the Information Age has ushered in.

6 Case Study: Adopting Kallik for Marketing Kallik has recently engaged with a mid-range global medical devices organisation to help its internal marketing teams achieve the same kind of efficiencies and control of organisational content as many Kallik customers achieve in their product labelling work. The following is based on direct interviews with the customer. Our initial need for Kallik stemmed from a desire to improve efficiency. We knew we needed to become much more efficient in terms of the management of our marketing resources. This was especially so around the development and approval of our labelling: like many organisations in our sector, we had been relying on increasingly antiquated, often paper-based systems to fulfill this need. But this was becoming less and less appropriate as the business grew, and management had identified the need for better processes allied to as much automation of those processes as possible - right across the group, ideally. Across the group signifies the fact that we are a global organisation, with multiple sites and more than one content creation studio (and marketing function). We wanted to set up a system where content, as well as labelling, creation was done in a much more transparent and auditable way. We are very pleased to say that the Kallik AMS360 has allowed us to meet many of these goals. Adopting Kallik - The Pay-Back We have, for example, been able to reduce our approvals cycle from 18 weeks to just five (over a six month period). This has been achieved as part of a general move to standardised content creation and management, based on Kallik as the common platform used by all the relevant teams. It has also meant much more consistent branding work across the entire company, in terms of both up- and down-stream marketing activity. There s also been a big improvement in documentation. If I had to sum up the biggest impact of using Kallik though, I d still say it was helping us get to a much better consistency of execution of marketing. We can break that down a bit further into benefits in terms of process and compliance. In process terms, Kallik has imposed a certain amount of formality. This was always the intention; we wanted to introduce a certain amount of rigidity around processes. However what s interesting to see is that it s had the side effect of improving quite sharply the quality of inputs to the system, as people would prefer to get the artwork right before they enter it on rather than go back in and edit/change or correct mistakes. That s moved collaboration and information sharing much higher up the agenda: team members want to spend time discussing things and getting them right first, which has really upped quality overall.

7 Case Study: Adopting Kallik for Marketing There s also the auditing aspect. Full transparency was always very hard to achieve with a paperbased approach. You had multiple boxes of paper, so it was going to be hard to find what you needed for a third-party auditor. Now, every item of relevant marketing data for the past three years is in the Kallik system, which offers us a central library of materials making it easy to find anything we need, and which in turn is making all our compliance work far more straightforward. That was particularly apparent during a very recent audit inspection by a European regulator. The team asked for certain data and was astonished to see we were able to provide everything they needed. Immediately! We showed them the logs; they had literally no questions. This was a very pleasing experience for both sides, which is important, as there s often a tension in these interactions that just wasn t there. The benefits of using the Kallik AMS360 in marketing have been improved process efficiency, reduced resource needed to deal with this work (which has freed it up to take on more value-add activities) as well as much smoother content creation for marketing needs. Just one example is the way we have used features in the product like Phrase Management to help in artwork generation, for instance. Not even Kallik is the Silver Bullet that fixes everything. We still have some work to do but we know that Kallik is a powerful tool that can and will help us a lot in getting to where we need to go. Where to go from here Kallik Ltd 2 Anker Court, Bonehill Road, Tamworth, Staffs, B78 3HP United Kingdom Telephone: +44 (0) LinkedIn: