Marketing Clinic

Quarterly Marketing Update

New accountability demands for the marketing organization

Dear reader,

Marketing Clinic’s Quarterly Marketing Update is our way of sharing learning and best practices from the field of marketing management with our clients. We hope to inspire you to find new ways to improve the productivity and accountability of marketing in your organization.

In the latest Quarterly Marketing Update we talked about ensuring effective usage of the marketing investment and provided insights to improving productivity of marketing in times of economic slowdown. In this issue we deepen the highly relevant and interesting theme of demands of accountability on the marketing organization through two successful case examples relating to marketing accountability and efficiency improvement. The first case describes the challenges of the Finnish Tax Administration in improving efficiency in operations and the well motivated decision to support reaching efficiency targets through investing in marketing of a new online service concept – the key word for management was marketing ROI analysis. The second case gives insights into how the impact of marketing can be increased for a credit information services provider, Experian Northern Europe, through redefinition of the role of marketing, alignment of the organization to support the defined role and improving focus of the marketing organization through introducing marketing KPIs. We hope that the client cases and the short summaries of key insight from Marketing Clinic´s recent client seminars will inspire you to find new opportunities for marketing!

Regards,

Facing new demands for increased efficiency in operations, the Finnish Tax Administration launched in 2007 a new online service concept, The online tax card. The online tax card service was seen as an investment, for which the success would be measured through customers’ willingness to use it. The battle for “market shares” for the online tax card service from the traditional telephone service had begun. With the new approach to marketing and communication of their services, the Finnish Tax Administration identified a clear need for measurement of ROI of their marketing investment.

With an increasing pressure to continuously improve top-line growth, Experian Northern Europe, a leader within company and credit information services, was faced with a challenge: How to increase the impact of marketing without increasing budgets and expenditure? Marketing Clinic was asked to assist in evaluating whether this was possible, and to design the solution and implementation plan.