Bringing Marketing Efficiencies through MRM-MOM-EMM

Recently a top executive from a leading MRM vendor while discussing the challenges for MRM vendor brought the following point. Let me quote her

“As MRM or EMM becomes more comprehensive and the feature set becomes more complex, there is increasing pressure from the customers to make it easy to use. Its a huge challenge for vendors to provide this comprehensive, complex feature in an easy to use manner.“

This is a sign of maturity within the MRM/EMM segment.  Its been more than decade when this domain came into existense and as the time passed away the domain as a whole have become more mature and moving towards commoditization. Now the focus is not merely on the functionality but also on other aspects of functionality which is culmination of technology and other factors.

Today MRM/EMM solution are expected to

1. Scalable for SaaS model.
2. Intuitive to use.
3. Comprehensive in Functionality.
4. Inter Operable with any Enterprise Systems.

Apart from these challenges the major challenges the vendors are facing is increased pressure from IT department of the customer who are adding different dimension to the entire deployment or solution. Some of the challenges are

1. Integration with existing Identity management.
2. In house deployment for customer.
3. Strict SLA requirements.

Organisation are looking MRM/EMM more as comprehensive solution to provide insight not only into their marketing resource but also resource related to marketing which has now brought things such as procurement management, agency governance and others into the bigger picture of MRM/EMM. The challenge lies not to implement these as part of the solution but how to leverage the existing resources for such additional areas for a deloyment.

One of the areas where I found the MRM/EMM segment to be weak is reluctance of vendors to come at a platform to make standards. There should be more co-operation among the vendors to bring more value to segment keeping aside their corporate rivalry. Currently the segment is define more by the analyst then by the vendors who are implementing the solution. Unless the vendors come together on a common platform it will be hard to find the change in wind.

One of the other areas that need some attention from the vendors is investment on the research & development for the solution. Thought this year Gartner report does mention some of the vendors investing for the same. But more need to done. Thanks to Frans Riemersma for introducing the first book on the MRM. We need more such effort for commoditization of the entire MRM from being a niche solutions.