Why the same clients appear on various vendor lists
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
In an upcoming market like MRM you don't expect that companies work with multiple vendors to automate their marketing. One explanation is that these projects are being initiated locally and at small scale. Recently we saw a client of ours at a client list of a competitor with a case description that indicated work that we currently are doing. Have we lost the client I asked myself? Not at all. After indicating this to the client they took action towards this competitor because the work they did had nothing to do with marketing or marketing resource management...

See what MarketingGovernance are reporting about this issue:

Many companies are having a hard time to align marketing operations cross departmental. Read the signs and just have a look at the client lists of MRM software vendors.

How is it possible that many MRM software vendors claim to have the same brand as a client. Isn't that strange? Are they lying?

You know what? They probably do have these brands as a client. Except, they have different "internal clients", e.g. marketing procurement department, different product line, regional or local company etc..

Check the portfolio's of e.g. Elateral, MarketingCentral and Interwoven. They all have Sony as a client.

Xerox shows up in the portfolio's of e.g. Cordeo, Interwoven, MarketingCentral and Mtivity.

Sometimes the reason for this is just poor communication or poor knowledge sharing between departments of the brand owner. Sometimes it's to bypass the IT department. Sometimes it shows the difference between a centralized and decentralized marketing operations.

The common denominator is that they probably all lack one marketing resource management strategy.
Wilco Turnhout, 7/10/2007