Marketing Mix: The Four Ps

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Marketing mix is a set of interdependent tools for increasing BusinessObjects usage and the impact it has within your company. If you speak to one of your internal marketing experts, he or she may give you a couple more Ps to add to the mix, but for business intelligence the most important Ps are product, price, promotion, and place.

Product

If you think the choice of product is predetermined (BusinessObjects or WebI), think again! In some circles and with some user segments, these product names may have meaning and recognition. Many business users, however, have never heard of them. In this respect, you will have to repeat, within your own organization, all the selling Business Objects the company had to go through to persuade you to buy their tool set.

As you do so, focus as much as possible on the benefits your implementation will deliver, not the technical features of the products. Consider some of the products you buy as a consumer. For example, Disney World emphasizes the magic and memories (the benefits), not the number of rides and attractions (the features). Particularly with business intelligence, a number of technical features will have little meaning to users, yet clearly, IT professionals are comfortable focusing on features. Restating the features in terms of the benefits is one of the hardest language barriers for the project team to overcome. Table 4-3 highlights some features that are better described to users in terms of the benefit they provide.

Table 4-3: Emphasize Benefits, Not Features

Feature	Benefit
Aggregate awareness	Fast queries
Corporate documents repository	Immediate access to key performance indicators; one version of the truth with no loss in time reconciling different reports
Offline access	Ability to work with reports while on the plane or at a customer site
Ad hoc queries	Explore the root cause of a problem, without waiting for an IT report developer
Exception-based reporting	Proactively manage the business when indicators fall below a certain threshold; fix a problem before it is out of control

In a few instances, the feature and related benefit will be clear; but these instances are in the minority. For example, if you emphasize the ability to create graphs, spreadsheet users who have used graphs in their analysis will recognize that graphs provide the benefit of visual analysis and a faster ability to spot trends, problems, and opportunities. When you buy a car, you know that four-wheel or front-wheel drive (feature) will allow you to control your car better in snow (the benefit). When the benefit is not immediately clear, document it as part of your project plan. Then have the project team practice articulating the benefits so that they 1) stay focused on why you are implementing BusinessObjects and 2) can more effectively promote your efforts in both formal and casual conversations with users.

A second aspect to the product component of the market mix is, what will you call the product? Will you refer to it by the vendor-provided product names, or will you give it a different name that also reflects the business goals and data sources? The benefit of including the vendor-provided name is that you can leverage some of the vendor's marketing efforts. The downside is if the vendor changes product names, it can cause confusion. If you are suffering from a stalled implementation or if there were negative impressions early in the implementation, change the name! When you develop your own BI product name, be sure to consider the acronym created. If it is a global deployment, take into account the cultural impact of acronyms. Following are some clever product names:

• WISDOM WebIntelligence Supporting Decisions, from Owens & Minor

• OASIS Online Analysis Sales Information System

• Risk Intelligence Used by Zurich North America for insurance claims and losses

• Inventory Workbench Used by Lands' End for inventory information delivered via Application Foundation

Price

Internal pricing with business intelligence tools depends in large part on what you have done in the past with reporting systems and what you do with other information systems. Many companies do not charge end users for using BusinessObjects. It is reflected as an indirect cost, part of corporate overhead. Some companies will charge a flat fee when a user is first granted access to BusinessObjects or WebI. This approach may help you manage the implementation to ensure that the people who need access the most will also pay for it. However, let's assume your company has already bought 1,000 licenses. The company has already incurred the expense. Re-charging business units may help move the costs from the IT department to the business unit, but it has no material effect on company expenses. Your goal is to get the information closer to the decision-makers. You also need to recover your expenses, so you charge per trained user. This per-user fee may inadvertently cause the business unit manager to restrict the number of BusinessObjects users. Their budget is tight; they need to control expenses, no matter that it has no effect on company cash flow. The business stays stuck in the information flow of one central person running and distributing reports. The pricing strategy just caused you to fail to bring the information closer to the decision-maker.

Although BusinessObjects Auditor allows you to create reports for billing, the risk with direct charges that relate to usage is that you may also inadvertently discourage usage. The more expensive it is to analyze data, the less likely users will explore information. In determining a direct-billing approach, you need to evaluate how advanced your company is in terms of information literacy and where you want to get to. If the data warehouse or WebI servers are overloaded, then charging for usage may help you recover costs to pay for increasing capacity. If the servers are underutilized, don't charge by usage.

Companies are more likely to charge directly when the customers are external. Owens & Minor, for example, charges customers for access to WISDOM. Here, WebI is a source of revenue and the charges indicate WISDOM has exceptional value; if Owens & Minor offered it as a free service, customers might not have appreciated its value. An insurance company told me they began charging external customers only when they moved from mainframe reports to a data warehouse. Customers balked. They had never paid for reports in the past, why should they pay now? It didn't matter to them that they finally had more data and more flexibility than before. Nobody likes a price increase, especially if it has been forced upon them. If users had a free DSS or mainframe reports before, then don't charge for access to fixed reports. You can deploy the reports via InfoView, or you can create two different user profiles via Supervisor (see Chapter 12) for fixed reports versus ad hoc functionality. Charge only the ad hoc user group for the increased functionality.

Place

Place is where you deliver BusinessObjects or the reports. Somehow the place is a seldom-considered aspect of a business intelligence project, yet it is a component of the marketing mix that greatly affects which of the vendor's products you use. Table 4-4 lists some of the places you may deliver standard reports or interactive analysis; each of these places affects the product functionality you will teach the users as well as the vendor products you choose to deploy.

Table 4-4: Place Affects Which Products You Deploy and How

Place	Product or Functionality
Palm pilot or other hand-held device	InfoView Mobile
E-mail with generic report	BusinessObjects, File | Save As | PDF
E-mail with personalized report	Broadcast Agent Publisher
Corporate intranet	BusinessObjects, File | Save As HTML; Broadcast Agent with reports distributed to a web server
Disconnected notebook	BusinessObjects offline mode
Web browser	InfoView, Application Foundation
Work group directory	BusinessObjects, File | Save As; Broadcast Agent with reports distributed to a network server
Remote dial-in	BusinessObjects with Citrix, or WebI
Corporate extranet	InfoView or WebI v6, HTML Report Panel

Promotion

Many BI deployments focus on the product and capabilities they want to deliver and pay little attention to promotion. The project team, staffed primarily with IT people, focuses on development efforts and not on the promotion activities that should accompany an implementation plan. Changing from an old reporting environment or decision-making process to a new one requires promotion.

Users will go through an evolution as you promote BusinessObjects. During the funding and development stages of the project, you want to build awareness about what is coming. You want everyone-not just the power or primary users described in Chapter 3-to have heard of BusinessObjects or your BI product name. As you get closer to delivering capability, you want to increase knowledge as your target user segment learns when and how to use BusinessObjects. The third phase of promotion is to increase usage, in which people within all levels of the organization are aware of BusinessObjects, know when to use it, and use it as an invaluable tool to achieve business goals. You may use different media to achieve these different promotional stages. Different user segments will be at different stages simultaneously.

When to Promote

There is a comfort in waiting to promote BusinessObjects only when you are finished with the first phase of your BI development. If you wait until then, however, you are starting too late and it will take you longer to achieve any measurable benefits. Users must be aware of BusinessObjects long before they sign up for a training class. Clearly, you need to manage user expectations and not promise more functionality than what you can deliver. In early promotions, emphasize the high-level benefits, implementation waves, and broad time frames. Battered IT departments who have been criticized for being late in the past may truly cringe at this approach. I understand. I dreaded handing out promotional material on this book at the user conference, a full three months before I was due to finish writing it! Seeing the book already on Amazon.com while I am still writing the final chapters is enough to induce a panic attack. However, in order to build demand and excitement, you must promote early, well before you are ready for deployment. How far in advance did Business Objects begin promoting version 6? Months! Hervé Couturier, Business Objects VP of Products, demonstrated the pre-beta in front of thousands of users and appropriately likened the experience to bungee jumping. Yet these early promotions of a new product generated demand and excitement. He gave no exact release dates, so expectations were well managed. You don't have to like promoting early, but you do have to do it.

Key Messages

When you promote your BI solution, develop key messages that emphasize the benefits, not just the features. Look to emulate some of the most effective promotional campaigns, as shown in the following table. Business Objects recently trademarked their key message 'Business Intelligence. If you have it, you know' and emphasizes 'turning knowledge into information into profit' in many of their promotional media. The key messages you develop will depend a lot on the situation analysis. If users currently have to wait months to receive a custom report, a key message may be 'information now.' If one of the goals is to retain customers, a key message may be 'helping you know our customers.' If users access paper-based reports and there is a low level of computer literacy, then a key message like 'good-bye paper-based reports' may cause a panic.

Product	Benefit	Key Message
Ford Trucks	Rugged enough to go anywhere	'Built tough'
Calgon Bath Crystals	Relaxation	'Calgon, take me away'
Bounty Paper Towels	Clean spills fast with fewer towels	'The quicker picker upper'
Miller Lite	Drink more beer	'Tastes great, less filling'
7-Up	Clear, refreshing, different from cola	'The un-cola'

Promotional Media

Choose the media according to the desired promotional frequency and target user segment. Promotion is not something you do once, but rather, it requires repetition. Do you ever see a commercial one time? No, you see and hear the same messages in magazines, on TV, and on radio. Remember, the goal with promotion is to move people from awareness of BusinessObjects to usage. It will take a number of repetitions, with different messages and media to get there.

Recall from Chapter 3 that only a portion of BusinessObjects users may actually log into the repository. Therefore, if you use the universe description or an InfoView sign-on page as your main communication medium, the message will not reach many user segments. You need an alternative medium such as staff meetings, newsletters, or e-mail campaigns to reach these secondary users.

Time your promotion efforts to certain project milestones. For example, if you give T-shirts away as project awards, have the team wear their T-shirts when you release a new universe or complete a software upgrade.

• Road shows When companies first start developing a business intelligence solution, many have corresponding information sessions about what is coming, when phase 1 will be available, and who will be trained first. The most successful 'road shows' include business success stories and user testimonials on how BusinessObjects has had a measurable impact. For example, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina has an established data warehouse and BusinessObjects implementation. Even with a mature deployment, they still do two road shows a month for new groups of users. Their implementation is so successful that the project team is often now invited to speak at staff meetings to tell people about new functionality and how business units are benefiting from business intelligence.

• Video Some companies have created videos to use at road shows or staff meetings. The video may show the CEO, the project sponsor, or a business user giving a testimonial as to how BusinessObjects helps the business. While a video may be difficult to produce at first, it helps reduce travel costs and logistic issues in always getting the right people together.

• Company newsletters Existing corporate newsletters are excellent media for high-level messages to a broad audience. Given the readership of company newsletters, the primary purpose of these articles is to build awareness, not necessarily usage. These articles should include information about the business goals and project milestones. You do not need to get too detailed about functionality.

• Industry journals Companies often seem to have the attitude that user conferences and articles in industry journals help the careers of the project staff and not necessarily the company. Not true! Owens & Minor has received a number of industry awards, something that helped create enthusiasm internally and helped them win new contracts. As another example, my mother is the quintessential bargain-shopper, and I seem to have inherited her skill when it comes to rental cars. For me, the only way to find a rental car is to compare all the prices online, then dig through junk drawers to find stray coupons. After a few bad experiences in which I waited as long for a rental car as my flight time, I came across an article on how Avis is using business intelligence to improve customer service and loyalty. I do have an affinity to any company that uses business intelligence effectively, so I gave them a try and now I'm hooked. I went from standing in line, waiting up to an hour for a car, to being greeted with a smile, addressed by my name (instead of a gruff 'NEXT!'), and driven directly to a warm, running car. This same level of service has been repeated at multiple airports. Avis didn't gain me as a customer by an advertisement, but rather, by an article about their business intelligence implementation in a business journal. Did this article help the careers of the development team? Perhaps, but it also directly added to the company's market share. There are a number of ways to get your project into an industry journal. You can author an article. You can volunteer to be interviewed by Business Objects for a press release. Your company's public relations department can issue a press release either to technical journals such as Computer World, DM Review, Intelligent Enterprise, or if it has more of a business slant, to industry journals.

• Training classes Training sessions should go beyond the straight how-tos and address the benefits and business application of the data and of sharing information. Some companies use a game-style approach to training to generate enthusiasm. For example, one company regularly holds group workshops in which they divide the group into two teams. There is a question and answer session in which the two teams compete to share tips and best practices.

• Brown bag lunches A brown bag lunch is a casual information sharing session in which participants bring a bagged lunch and discuss BusinessObjects or the data warehouse. A facilitator may start the lunch with a success story, tip, or project update. These provide a useful follow-up to training and another opportunity to raise awareness about best practices, success stories, and benefits. In the earlier SWOT analysis, Table 4-2, one of the strengths was that the data warehouse was mature and a number of initial ETL problems had been resolved. In this same company, the data warehouse project team communicated each resolution via e-mail. Users became desensitized to repeated e-mails and no longer trusted the integrity of the data warehouse. They were convinced that if they used BusinessObjects again, they would find still more errors. It took several face-to-face discussions during brown bag lunches and a comparison of BusinessObjects reports with ERP-based reports to acknowledge the historical problems, explain how the problems had been resolved, and motivate the power users to trust the new reporting environment.

• Internal user conferences Just as Business Objects and regional user groups host periodic user conferences, do the same in your organization. Kick off the meeting with a review of the benefits, project milestones, and a key success story. Then ask users to share tips and techniques on both the how-to of BusinessObjects and how it has helped them achieve business goals.

• T-shirt days Many project teams give away T-shirts, sunglasses, and other promotional items to reward staff for their accomplishments. As both a motivational technique and a promotion opportunity, get the entire team to wear their giveaway on milestone dates. This works particularly well if the T-shirt is brightly colored. Seeing 50 yellow T-shirts in the company cafeteria will generate interest and curiosity about what's new.

• Intranet The InfoView portal and universe description may be useful for promoting to existing users and keeping them informed; however, they are poor media for secondary and potential users. Secondary and potential users do not log into InfoView or BusinessObjects, so they will never see these messages. You can best reach these users through staff meetings and company newsletters. For primary users, the intranet and universe descriptions are ideal places to repeat key messages and project goals.

• Staff meetings Most departments and business units have regularly scheduled staff meetings. Ask for five minutes on the agenda each quarter to give an update on new deliverables, problem resolution, and how other departments are benefiting from BusinessObjects. A real sign of success is when the department invites you and requests 30 minutes!

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