November 14, 2005

No, that doesn't mean I'm attending a conference on parenting. In the wild world of acronyms, MOM stands for Marketing Operations Management and this is a two-day conference designed to help organizations understand exactly what this means.

Beth Weesner, the Principal at Marketing Transformation Services, kicked things off with an explanation of MOM and an overview of how it relates to other areas such as MRM (Marketing Resource Management) and EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management). Yes, there is definitely a little bit of alphabet soup action going on here!

To give you just the highlights of Weesner's presentation, she emphasized that:

• Companies need to shift from "industrial age" marketing to "information age" marketing. Whereas "industrial age" marketers could hang on to their competitive edge for up to nine months at a time, today's marketers can lose it in a matter of weeks or even days.
  
• Marketing has evolved to focus on building customer loyalty, education, building a bridge between customer support and the customer, etc. as opposed to just lead generation (sounds like Stephen's post a while back).
  
• Customers today want to be independent - they want a self service model. The challenge therefore is for marketers to figure out how to facilitate this.

Immediately following Weesner's presentation was a panel discussion on the role of the Marketing Operations Director. The panel included speakers from Intuit, BEA Systems, Symantec and Sun, and the moderator was an analyst from IDC.

The moderator (Michael Gerard, Research Director, CMO Advisory Research, IDC) started off in true IDC fashion...by throwing out some numbers. According to IDC, the role of Marketing Operations Director has been one of the hottest job titles in 2005, accounting for 2%-4% of the marketing staff at technology vendors.

Gerard went on to predict that the role will become increasingly important as more and more infrastructure and processes are deployed within marketing departments. He also said that this position is likely to become the "conscious of marketing." (Okay, I understand where he is coming from on this, but I'd be lying if I said this statement didn't rub me the wrong way.)

At any rate, most of the questions during this discussion focused on how the role of Marketing Operations Director fits within the marketing departments at each of the companies represented. Most of the answers were very similar - for example, the role reports to the CMO and interfaces with sales, customer support, finance and IT.

Probably the most interesting point made during this discussion came from the speaker from Intuit. Carrie Nedrow, Senior Program Manager of Strategic Initiatives, said that one of benefits Intuit saw from implementing the Marketing Operations role was a significant reduction in marketing program cycle time (i.e. the time it takes to craft a new campaign from start to finish). According to Nedrow this has been cut from 24 weeks to 6.

The wireless network here is pretty wimpy, but I'll do my best to keep blogging. Next up: sessions on Six Sigma Marketing and an eBay case study.

Posted by at November 14, 2005

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