Aprimo of Indianapolis, Indiana, won the Stevie Award for Best Marketing Solution-New Version in the 2011 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, the world's top sales awards and customer service awards. (Entries for the 2012 Sales & Customer Service Awards are now being accepted.) Here we look at what Aprimo has achieved in the niche area of Integrated Marketing Management.

Unlocking the Value in Online Data
Commenting on the recent acquisition by Teradata of Stevie Award-winning marketing software and services company Aprimo, Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research highlighted the increasing importance of Integrated Marketing Management: “Besides being a growth category—our last forecast estimated that this market is growing at roughly 17%—campaign management is mission critical. It is the fundamental technology that allows marketers to use customer data to develop relevant, multichannel communications.

“Simply put, it unlocks the value in customer data. This is particularly timely given the unprecedented growth in data volumes, driven primarily by the popularity of online, social, and mobile channels.”

A Single Marketing Solution
It’s clear that today’s marketing professional has to deal with many challenges, not the least of which are the number of new social media channels that appear on an almost daily basis. He or she also experiences the demoralizing effect of churn in senior marketing positions and the constant pressure to improve return on investment (ROI) while doing more with less.

With its aim to be a catalyst of marketing innovation, in 2010 Aprimo added to its suite of Integrated Marketing Management solutions by introducing Aprimo Marketing Studio®.   According to Bill Godfrey, co-founder of Aprimo: “From day one, Aprimo's vision has been to give B2B and B2C marketers a single solution to integrate all of their marketing, including people, processes, channels, and technology.”

Aprimo Marketing Studio® On Demand
Four of the ways that Aprimo Marketing Studio® (AMS) On Demand can help marketers to improve their ROI are by:

1. Accelerating time to market for revenue-generating campaigns, product launches, and strategic brand initiatives;
2. Enabling smarter decisions across the enterprise by leveraging data to
   gain insights, recognize emerging opportunities, and respond quickly;
3. Optimizing and delivering successful campaigns seamlessly across all digital
   channels; and
4. Streamlining operations to drive more effective marketing.

A Complete View
Aprimo takes a holistic view of marketing from the planning and operational stage through execution to reporting and optimization. AMS™ On Demand supports this approach as it allows customers to keep all online and offline marketing activities, the associated attachments, supporting documents, costs, and marketing assets in one knowledge base.

This complete view is required to evaluate a company’s marketing portfolio, manage resources, and optimize marketing ROI. AMS™ On Demand helps to create a true partnership between various departments in an organization, which in turn makes companies more efficient.

Aprimo Mobile
In the past year, Aprimo also launched a new offering, Aprimo Mobile, which
enables marketers to manage critical initiatives like campaigns, activities and
reports generated in AMS™ On Demand from any smartphone device, including the iPad™, iPhone®, and BlackBerry® and DROID™ devices.  This is the first mobile marketing solution that lets marketers keep campaigns moving, regardless of location, and make better, more informed decisions from the road.

Global Marketing
Aprimo’s cloud-based Integrated Marketing Management solutions now have more than 150,000 professional users worldwide, including over one third of Fortune 100 companies and nearly one quarter of Global 100 companies, more than all other integrated marketing software vendors combined.

Merger with Teradata
In January 2011, Aprimo was acquired by Teradata, a company focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics.  Aprimo co-founder Bill Godfrey commented: “[The acquisition] is a significant step forward in our successful journey in being the recognized leader of Integrated Marketing Management solutions. The combination of our teams and solutions will enable us to continue accelerating growth, fueling innovation for our customers, and rapidly expanding our global presence. With these combined assets, we look forward to delivering world-class applications that will greatly benefit our customers and partners, and provide a vibrant environment for Aprimo’s team.”

Aprimo will remain located in Indianapolis.

About Bill Godfrey:
William (Bill) Godfrey is the visionary driving Aprimo's strategic direction and integration with Teradata Corporation. In 1998, he co-founded Aprimo as the first software company focused on digitizing the end-to-end marketing value chain. Under Bill’s leadership, Aprimo has created the market now known as Integrated Marketing Management. His passion for customer success and innovative solutions has led to Aprimo's continuing market leadership as rated by Gartner, Forrester Research, and other top research firms.

About Aprimo:
Aprimo, a Teradata company, is a leading global provider of marketing software and services that enhance the productivity and performance of marketing organizations. Through the use of Aprimo’s integrated marketing software—Aprimo Marketing Studio® for B2C, Aprimo Marketing Studio® for B2B, and Aprimo® Relationship Manager—marketers can integrate their organizations, get control of budget and spend, eliminate internal silos with streamlined workflows, and execute innovative multi-channel campaigns to drive measurable return on investment. Founded in 1998, Aprimo is headquartered in Indianapolis with offices worldwide. For more information call +44 (0)121 380 1670 or visit www.aprimo.com.

About Teradata:
Teradata Corporation, Aprimo’s parent company, is the world’s largest company focused on raising intelligence through big data analytics, data warehousing, and integrated marketing management. Teradata acquired Aprimo in January 2011. For more information, visit www.Teradata.com.

BrainJuicer Group PLC was named Company of the Year in Advertising, Marketing & Public Relations in The 2011 International Business Awards. (The IBAs are the world's top business awards program, open to all organizations and individuals worldwide. The 2012 IBAs open for entries in January - get the entry kit.)

We asked BrainJuicer founder John Kearon for some insight on what's new in marketing research.

What are your top 3 tips for new marketing research methods?

OK, here’s a thought experiment for you: If you had shares in every market research approach and were prepared to create a portfolio to hold for the next decade, which market research methods would you be buying and selling?

I’d start by shedding my entire portfolio of classic research approaches that rely on people’s post-rationalized beliefs about why they do things and what they say they like, asked in environments unrelated to the behavior in question. I’m not saying they won’t continue to be important in MR, but I am saying I believe they will be declining rather than growing.  So my top 3 “sells” would be:

1. All current pre-testing and concept testing approaches.  They have a notoriously bad record for predicting failure for some of the best-known and commercially successful adverts and new product launches. Adverts such as the Cadbury Gorilla and Stella Artois’ Jean de Florette—both reassuringly expensive campaigns—were punished in classic pre-testing; and new product launches including Bailey’s Irish Cream, cash point machines, and the Sony Walkman also fared badly in classic-concept testing research.

2. Perhaps controversially, I would also be selling Focus Groups. Yes, they can reveal powerful insights in the hands of a great researcher, but all too often they are just the lazy default of unquestioning research buyers and produce little or no insight on the subject at hand.

3. My final sell would be Brand and Advertising Tracking. As far as I can see, this is dead from the neck up, offering little or no insight, direction, or positive contribution beyond the comfort blanket of a monthly number. If this sort of research were banned, businesses would suffer withdrawal symptoms for a couple of months, after which they’d never go back.   Instead, they’d spend the money on the sort of research techniques outlined below that can actually help companies grow.

Now to what to buy. I’m interested in those research approaches most closely tied to Behavioural Economics. BE is finally explaining how people really make decisions and showing it to be quite different from what current market research believes. My top 3 “buys” would therefore be:

Any “We Research” techniques, such as prediction markets.  These techniques are increasing the accuracy of concept testing by tapping our ability as social animals to predict the behavior of other people, yet doing it better than we can predict our own.

I would also be buying shares in Ethnography and Netnography, as anything based on observation of what people really do is massively more accurate than what people say they do—or the reasons they give for saying it.

My final pick would be Game-Based Research. This can help put people into the context, mood, or hot state they would actually be in when choosing a response, so it elicits far more accurate research results than the vast majority of current, non-contextual research.

What item of news recently caught your eye and why?

In the UK, the quality newspapers’ reaction to Steve Job’s passing was sadly revealing of our liberal intelligentsia’s dismissal of the significance of anything they see as commercial. Some of the commentaries bordered on the Pythonesque in their “What have the Romans ever done for us?” tone.  Sure, Jobs invented the computer interfaces we take for granted; sure, he shaped the devices we use to play our music and changed the way we buy music and media; it’s true he redefined what a mobile phone is for and generated a global lust for beautiful and functional technology … but what did he ever do for us? The journalists urged us to get a little perspective. Jobs was hardly Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu, he was really just a good marketer and surely not deserving of the eulogies erupting around the world. I am saddened by the anti-commercial attitude that still survives in Britain towards the entrepreneurs and inventors who through creativity, boldness, and perseverance bring great products to a grateful public. I sincerely hope attitudes change and that we start to finally appreciate people like our own Jonathan Ive (selected by Jobs as his design guru, now SVP of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. and the conceptual mind behind everything from the iMac to the iPhone and iPad) and the engineer James Dyson, who has reinvented the way we clean our homes.

Do you have a favorite business app?

I love technology … but the wonderfully friendly, long suffering, Wayne Nightingale—who meets me off transatlantic flights with a cup of tea and drives me home to the kids—has to be my best business app. Thanks, Wayne!

If you could choose another profession, what would it be?

I’d be busy blowing up current approaches to education and setting up highly alternative schools whose motto might have to be: “You’d be mad to send your child here.”  Education must be the only field of life where a Victorian child transported in time to the present day would essentially recognize the experience. Now, that means either that our education system was perfected long ago, or—more likely—that there hasn’t been nearly enough progress since. You just have to compare it to the advances in medicine over the same time period to wonder how our education system could have looked. I hope I’ll get a chance to make a contribution to the system before I pop my clogs.

What quality or qualities do you most value in your business associates?

The passion and perseverance to be really good at the thing they do best; the integrity to be true to themselves; the tolerance to know what it takes to work well with others; and the playfulness to enjoy their work.

What do you think is the worst bad habit to have at work?

To think work is just the dull chore we’re forced to do before we retire. Don’t be boring, don’t be too serious, make sure you enjoy what you do, take some risks, have some fun … and see what you can achieve!

As someone at the top of your profession, what keeps you inspired or makes you hit the ground running in the morning?

Caffeine and alcohol help … as well as a contrarian spirit that enjoys change for change’s sake.  I like to question market research dogma and to invent exciting new ways to better understand and predict human behavior. 

About John Kearon
John Kearon, dubbed "the Steve Jobs of Market Research", is Chief Juicer and Founder of BrainJuicer Group PLC. John has been recognized by Ernst & Young twice for his entrepreneurship: Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005 and the London region’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009. BrainJuicer has been a two-time winner of the ESOMAR Award for Best Methodology (in 2005 and 2007), and John was awarded the Advertising Research Foundation’s Gold Award for Great Mind/Research Innovator in 2008.

John’s recipe for success is: creativity, resilience, determination, perseverance, stamina, drive, imagination, resourcefulness, courage, commitment, ability to go without sleep, and a touch of madness.

About Brainjuicer
BrainJuicer Group PLC, a thriving international marketing consultancy founded in 1999, provides fresh, validated, consumer-driven insight to 11 of the world’s top 20 consumer companies, their creative agencies, and many others. BrainJuicer specializes in helping clients with innovation, focusing on ideas, insights, concepts, communications, and the measurement of customer and employee satisfaction.  Learn more at BrainJuicer.com.