While process optimization and (semi-)automation has been established as standards in other business functions, marketing has for a long time proclaimed creative chaos for itself and has experienced difficul-ties in standardizing workflows and automating processes. It had a hard time recognizing that process optimization does not impose obstacles to creativity but in the opposite, at times of increasing market pressure and requirements, represents an effective means to create more room for marketing’s essential tasks.

This Focus Paper is aimed at introducing the topic “Marketing Process Optimization”, pointing out where it can be utilized, how it optimizes productivity and what its consequences are for the marketing department.
Marketing - the most stressful job on the planet?
Marketing may be the most stressful and least appreciated job on earth!

This is what you might feel when thinking about the fact that the merits of the exhausting marketing business are always collected by the sales people in the end and that controlling is always watching and comparing the incredible costs to the value generated.

However, seen objectively, marketing departments sometimes make their job a hard time for themselves.
No doubt, working in marketing means an extremely high level of flexibility in surroundings of volatile and sometimes unclear structures. Acting in a market-oriented way enforces short-term changes in tactics and strategies while abandoning the plans so far and quickly putting new measures in place. However, how is marketing supposed to act in such flexible ways if information is not clearly structured and available on demand at any time?

A scenario coming up way too often in reality: Texts and graphics are needed for a publication as fast as possible. Actually, this is no big deal, since every marketing department should be able to reuse their existing CI-conform materials. But in fact, this is where the perplexity starts. Are the required materials stored centrally or are they still sitting in some mail inbox, waiting to be filed? If no one finds them in the inbox, they probably are centrally stored already, so the quest for the right file folder can begin. Once the relevant folder is finally found, the next problem is awaiting the marketer: various files without clear names, indicating anything about usage purpose and up-to-dateness. And if it comes even worse, the most up-to-date files have not even been stored yet, but are still on a colleague’s local drive so that there is no data access possible at all. Only after investing quite a lot of time for research, the actual work can begin: The contents need to be adapted to the current requirements of the task.

If there is not only a need to adapt texts but also graphics, it can become even more difficult. Frequently, the design department or creative agency need to receive a briefing on very short notice and all the mark-ter can do is hope for a fast response. Of course, the graphical work causes additional coordination effort, since, e.g., the briefing was lacking some important information or there was a mistake due to all the hectic.

As soon as all these obstacles have been overcome and the document is final, it can undergo the quality-assuring review and approval workflows. Usually, corrections are made to the printed document in hand-writing and most of the times there is more than one review cycle. Thus, it becomes almost impossible to keep an overview of the latest changes and corrections or new mistakes or errors occurring. After several reviews and corrections, the document is final at one point so that the publication can be produced and the project closed.

White paper written by BrandMaker.

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