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.

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1. Gartner, Inc. “Establish a Marketing Operations Office”, by Kimberly Collins, August 25 2008
2. Gartner, Inc. “Use Marketing Resource Management During Economic Uncertainty to Cut Costs and Manage Resources”, by Kimberly Collins, February 22 2008


Notes to editors

Marketingunity modules:
Campaign Manager - The core project management tool that details all component resources, activities and interdependencies. Campaign Manager monitors and displays progress against a master timeline with proactive notification of actions and exceptions by email.

Digital Asset Manager - The central repository of all digital assets from components to finished artworks. Version control ensures brand control and consistency and full audit trails and access control ensure security and minimise risk.

Approval Manager - Streamlines and secures the approval process with proactive email notification and a full audit trail. Page by page approvals with full commenting reduces the overall approval process time.

Compliance Manager - Specifically designed to enable compliance teams to monitor and manage regulated documents, this module provides a full audit trail with proactive notification of actions required by email.

Procurement Manager - Saves time and money by standardising the specification process, maintaining a database of suppliers and automating the quotation process with both sides accessing the same system.

Stock Manager - Enables full control, management and monitoring of stock whether in-house or through a service provider. Authorised users can call off supplies with support for multiple delivery addresses, warehouses, bin locations and production batches.

Order Manager - Provides a 'Self-Service' facility for your end users, whether internal departments, divisions or subsidiaries or external partners, distributors or customers. They can interact directly with your services ordering both standardised and customised collateral such as co-branded campaign literature or business cards.


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About Marketingunity (www.marketingunity.com)
Marketingunity is a privately-owned Marketing software company based in Newbury, UK. Since its foundation in 1996 by Managing Director Chris Hopwood, the company has specialised exclusively on database-driven, web based business software applications. In 2000, the company launched the UK’s first Web-based suite for Marketing procurement. Since then, continuous development driven exclusively by customer and market feedback has resulted in Marketingunity – one of the most comprehensive Marketing Resource Management (MRM) suites on the market.

Marketingunity is a modular suite of collaborative, web-based marketing applications that manage marketing operations and enhance productivity and performance across the whole Marketing Value Chain for all aspects of the marketing ecosystem, including corporate in-house marketing, procurement teams, field marketing staff, external agencies and suppliers.
Marketingunity is one of the most widely used MRM solutions today and has developed an impressive blue-chip customer base with over 1,200 global organisations, including global brands from the finance, retail, telecom and travel sectors.

Press contacts:

Marketingunity
Nicky Davis
EvokedSet PR
marketingunity[at] evokedset [dot] com
Phone:                +44 870 285 1650       

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