Commoditization of digital marketing development services?
I recently met up with an old friend who works for one of the largest global advertising and marketing groups. His focus area is Consumer Goods companies, and over drinks he was telling me that his clients are increasingly viewing digital marketing development services as a commodity.
While he was speaking from an agency perspective, his reference to commoditization got me thinking about what those CPG clients are driving towards. In this case it brought to mind 3 things; cheaper, quicker, and consistent; and how digital marketing platforms that we've built and run for global CPGs enable these goals.
Cheaper - When we hear commoditization we immediately think costs. My friend's concern is the cost of his agency services and a race to the bottom in rate cards, but there are many other cost components for CPGs. Some companies are already realising cost benefits by consolidating hosting & support activities and optimising processes, but this is only one gain to be had.
From an Infosys perspective the next logical savings opportunity comes in leveraging offshore delivery. Using the Global Delivery Model to shift work can immediately realise development and deployment savings of over 30%.
A further enabler of cost savings is in reusable assets. Agency rate cards can be expensive, and duplicating development effort across numerous sites can quickly add up. By reusing assets like webservices across sites, agencies can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs (and of course pass that savings on to the customer)!
Quicker - Reusability is a nice segue into time-to-launch. In today's dynamic marketing environment the time to take a site live is key. CPGs can't be limited to pre-planned marketing activities; they need agility to immediately react to everything from shifting consumer tastes to competitor movements.
As in our cost example above, calling on a library of reusable webservices and assets can shave weeks-to-months off development schedules, bringing sites live in a fraction of the time taken previously.
When combined with efficiencies from (previously mentioned) optimised processes, we've even seen sites taken from concept to live in less than 24 hours.
Consistent - In its early days Digital Marketing was a bit like the Wild West with brand and agencies within the same company left to their own devices; creating sites and campaigns with little alignment and few standards. This obviously led to inconsistency in user experiences and messaging across the brand portfolio and geographies. As digital strategies developed, consistency has gained importance with companies ensuring brand teams and agencies align to defined standards and practices. Building processes and audits in to a Digital Marketing Platform allows CPGs to ensure compliance whether it's messaging, aesthetics, or user journey.
Further, those same reusable webservices we talked about earlier mean that users are automatically getting a consistent experience when logging in, registering, or interacting with the site in any number of ways.
So if my friend is right and digital marketing development is being commoditized, a digital marketing platform may be the smart way for tomorrow's CPG to reap benefits in cost, time, and consistency...
