By Biswajit Das, Founder & Chairman, BrandIntelle
Ancient Greek. Mesopotamian, Roman, Medieval lore as well as the Hebrew Bible referred to the unicorn as a rare, four-legged creature with a single horn – to be found in a distant & fabled civilization from the East. (The reference was probably to the exotic rhinoceros from India.) But the first association of ‘unicorn’ with startups appeared in 2013 in an article. Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures referred to those startups as unicorns which attracted valuations of over US$ 1billion within a decade of their incorporation. Each unicorn co. invariably ends up creating at least one unicorn brand – the startup itself which has crossed a billion dollars in valuation in record time. Therefore, that makes the startup a fairly large company with processes engineered to facilitate execution, with minimum checks & balances. This is what makes a unicorn unique!
Process Compliance
Rapid scaling, wide adoption & unique product-market fit are a must for the initial phase of any unicorn. But as the company grows, processes definitely need to be modified. Failure to do so could result inserious lapses in compliance, auditing & even leakages & wastage. Of all the processes, Marketing finds a special mention, as it is known for being less process-driven, less audit-friendly & less visible to senior management. After all, which marketing team would like to be stuck in processes when it needs to respond promptly to the competition & take advantage of a situation? Now when Marketing & Unicorns come together (and this is inevitable at some point), it could lead to a situation where the overall ambience & processes of a unicorn may end up giving a freer-than-required hand to marketing – resulting in marketing spends which are higher than necessary. At some point, this may become critical if the unicorn still relies on VC funds for a major part of its expenses, including marketing. After all, which VC would not like to have visibility on the marketing burn?
Throw the Bath Water, Not the Baby
It becomes necessary to solve this complex situation but without losing the advantages of the startup culture
The obvious way is by:
• Implementing really smooth Marketing Department automation processes
• Enforcing discipline with minimum inconvenience & disruption
• Offering new age conveniences like
◦ Approvals on mobiles
◦ Unified communication linked to campaigns, plans & transactions
◦ AI based nudges
The above will ensure process compliance while retaining the spirit of the startup.
Marketing Automation Services
The need of the hour suggests that besides unifying all marketing processes across the enterprise, linking marketing analytics to the marketing process is also imperative. Firstly, brands need to unify all the marketing processes across the enterprise and link it to a live budget control mechanism. Special care should be taken to ensure that approvals are simple, convenient & available on mobiles. Next, brands need to make sure that all the marketing data is streamed into the central data lake – for easy dashboard reporting. This data along with other data is used to build analytics curves which are hosted inside the marketing process software for the benefit of decision makers. Through constant innovation and the right use of technology, many issues can be easily solved.