Marketingunity Launches Web-Based MRM Suite to Boost Productivity and Effectiveness of Marketing Tea

Tuesday, 11 November 2008 19:00

New Marketing Resource Management (MRM) Solution Builds on Success of Industry-Leading “Equator” Marketing Procurement Software

Newbury, United Kingdom, November 11, 2008 – Marketingunity, a leader in Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software, today announced the launch of its new integrated software suite specifically designed to boost the productivity, effectiveness and performance of professional marketing teams. The MarketingunityTM MRM suite is a collaborative web-based management tool that allows marketing teams to address the increasing pressures facing marketing departments. It achieves this by instantly boosting productivity, streamlining key processes and supply chain relationships, and optimising the use of budget and resources.

The Marketingunity suite has evolved over 8 years of continuous, customer-driven product development, building on the success and heritage of the company’s market-leading Equator software – the UK’s first web-based solution for marketing print procurement. The visionary Equator product has now evolved into Marketingunity, one of the most comprehensive MRM applications on the market, spanning the entire marketing product life-cycle from project planning to campaign fulfillment. The Marketingunity suite is delivering measurable time and cost savings and ensuring the highest possible return for marketing spend for over 1200 blue-chip global enterprises today, including the AA, Centrica, and DRAFTFCB, one of the world’s largest communications agency networks.

The Marketingunity platform is a strategic management tool that provides a complete real-time view of all aspects of marketing campaigns, and allows all marketing ‘team’ members (including field staff, agencies and suppliers) to effectively communicate, collaborate and contribute. According to analyst firm Gartner, "there is substantial waste in most marketing departments with approximately 25 per cent of the marketing budget spent on producing and managing marketing programs rather than on the actual promotions/campaigns”.1 It estimates that “time-to-market for creative production or product launches may be reduced from 12 to 15 weeks to four to six weeks using MRM solutions”. Further, Gartner predicts that “by 2011, companies that leverage MRM effectively will save more than 15 per cent of their annual marketing budgets.”2

Marketingunity replaces the separate spreadsheets and inefficient planning documents commonly relied upon by marketing teams by providing a single, unified online environment. From here, teams can access rich functionality, including the ability to proactively plan, align, and execute campaigns; select and manage internal resources, agencies and suppliers; manage workflows and approvals; manage digital assets; procure goods and services cost-effectively, and ensure timely fulfillment. The result is reduced costs, administration overheads and delays, and faster time-to-market – and longer time-in-market – for campaigns.

By delivering a comprehensive framework for optimising management control, reporting and best-practice, Marketingunity also helps marketing management meet the significant growth in reporting obligations resulting from increased corporate governance (including Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in the US and FSA regulations in the UK), plus greater scrutiny by Managing and Finance Directors looking to cut costs in all areas of their business.

Chris Hopwood, Managing Director and Founder of Marketingunity, explains: “With the current downturn and threat of recession, marketers are now facing a ‘triple whammy’ of challenges: doing as much marketing as before, often with less resources and money, but with some resources now being diverted to report on and justify what it is doing. The Marketingunity suite serves a critical need by maximising the efficiency of marketing operations and resources and enabling marketing teams to demonstrate that efficiency to other areas of the business.”

He continues, “Marketing functions worldwide are today implementing Marketingunity to deliver maximum value to their organisations and gain a competitive edge. Marketingunity has been conceived as a pragmatic solution that works in the ‘real world’ and starts delivering benefits immediately, so it can be easily implemented for a specific campaign or across an entire marketing programme.”

Marketingunity is a template-driven, modular solution that can be easily scaled to support any size of organisation, and is available to be installed either in an organisation’s own data centre or provided as a fully hosted managed service.