Book Review: High Performance Marketing

The marketing profession is in a state of flux right now. CEO's are challenging the notion that marketing is a strategic activity that falls under the category of "cost of doing business". Consumers are becoming more resistant to traditional (intrusive) marketing tactics and are opting out at an alarming rate. Performance-driven marketing, with an emphasis on "transparency and accountability", is more important than ever before.

Given this, consider High Performance Marketing by Naras Eechambadi to be the guidebook for leading marketing into the new millennium. Mr. Eechambadi, the founder and CEO of Quaero Corporation, covers six primary areas of focus: effective processes, actionable strategies, enabling technologies, information assets, organizational alignment, and appropriate measures. There are also case studies that illustrate many of the concepts. The book does border on salesmanship at times due to the author's business interest. But, it is an easy read and definitely highly recommended to any marketing professional, regardless of discipline, searching for real world solutions to some of the contemporary challenges faced by marketing organizations world wide.

Marketing Technologist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Unica Expands its Footprint

Unica Corporation, a leading Enterprise Marketing Management software vendor, is exploring new unchartered territory with two recent acquisitions. In December, the company purchased Marketsoft, a provider of event detection and lead management solutions. And in March, it acquired web analytics company Sane Solutions, LLC.

On March 28, Unica announced two new products - Affinium Detect and Affinium Leads. According to Unica's website, "these products are new releases and enhancements of the former MarketSoft Software Corporation products for event-detection, customer alerting, and lead management."

The Marketing Technologist View

Affinium Detect, if it performs as advertised, fills a huge gap in Affinium Campaigns event detection capabilities. The addition of a robust event engine with pre-packaged triggers will add more arrows in the quiver for Unica customers who want to develop out of the box right time offer management capabilities for upsell, cross-sell, and retention marketing. I'd want to see a demo to assess usability, the amount of customization that is available, and the level of integration with the other Affinium modules. But certainly this holds promise.

I also like the idea of Unica extending its interactive marketing capabilities. The acquisition of Sane Solutions aligns with Unica's multi-channel enterprise marketing vision. Many web analytic capabilities are hosted, which fits the online model to a tee. But, that creates data management issues when you want to analyze customer behavior across multiple channels. And that is important for non-dotcom companies whose customers often browse on the web, but purchase offline. I believe Unica will offer an on-premise open architecture solution in-line with its other offerings, which will be a differentiator.

In contrast, Affinium Leads (in my opinion) is a head scratcher. There isn't any mention of integration with any of the leading Sales Force Automation solutions. Is it intended to be stand-alone? To my knowledge, Marketsoft didn't gain a lot of traction around its lead and contact management offering and I'm not sure why Unica would want to venture into this space (even with its installed base).