The Journey into the World of Marketing Service Providers Begins

You often hear that we are in a constant state of change, forever evolving into something greater than ourselves. This is true in our personal and professional lives. My journey begins, as I take the next step with my company and my career.

It's curious to me how past experiences in life help prepare one for that step. In St. Louis many years ago, I worked as a data specialist for a pharmacy franchise. My job was to crunch data and help our franchisees with their local marketing. Most days I found myself staring at computer screens knowing I had the very livelihood of these franchisees in my hands. I worked with their individual customer data, looking for uniqueness and shared qualities, trying to establish buying habits and trends. We looked at income levels and ethnicities, attempting to discern as much as we could about the people shopping at our pharmacies. Every day we searched through demographic programs and spreadsheets until we identified our true target market. This was the exact personality and lifestyle traits of the people who shopped in out stores. We developed complete marketing campaigns around these known demographics and completely changed the way marketing was accomplished at our company. The work was fun and fascinating, however extremely limited. There was no Variable Data Printing (VDP), no Personal URLs (Purls), no unique landing pages with information capture. Here we had all this information collected and were limited by only the traditional models to implement it. We did utilize blanket direct mail, radio commercials, and even TV commercials but had little idea how well any of those methods worked. It's the same old cliché, "If I only knew then what I know now. . . ."

As I'm able to look back now, I realize that this was my first step in becoming a Marketing Service Provider (MSP). What is a MSP? It's a company that sets itself apart by focusing on ROI (return on investment) versus just a campaign or just producing a job; a company that can see beyond the bottom-line and focus more on the ultimate goal; a company that can help a client define its target market and current demographics and then implement a program to target them and complete the overall objectives, such as increased revenues, same-store sales, or meeting an over-goal of selling "X" amount of product; to be able to see beyond an ad agency and have more flexibility than a Commercial Printer (CP); utilizing capabilities that allow you to actually test and prove what is working or not; to be able to justify the spending on a campaign with metrics to prove results. Think about the power of being able to tangibly realize that your great marketing idea was effective (and to what degree!) and with the ability prove it! That's a MSP; and that's powerful.

Now I have the unique opportunity to take this learned knowledge and apply it. My desire is to share my continuing journey and perspective as my company makes the transition from CP to MSP. I will talk about what we discover along the way. Hopefully you will find this information insightful and helpful.