IBM

Case Study

IBM and Ogilvy

IBM has over 80,000 business partners worldwide that are responsible for a huge portion of their income. They rely on those businesses to promote and champion IBM in their local markets. To aid their partners, while protecting and strengthening the brand, they wanted to develop quality marketing materials that are above the usual standards of what is typically available to small and medium businesses.

Client Profile

• Industry: Information Technology
• Products: Desktop machines, servers, networking, storage products and consulting services.

Challenges

• Protect the IBM brand. IBM has carefully cultivated its brand over decades. Doing co-marketing, particularly in languages and localities around the world, is a tightrope walk of trying to balance the dealers' needs while still preserving the IBM brand.
• Provide response metrics. Traditional "co-marketing kits" merely provide assets to partners, but provide no way to track responses and ultimately campaign results. IBM and Ogilvy wanted a way to measure the results of entire campaigns and individual tactics.
• Consolidate and economize. IBM allowed individual countries and internal product areas to develop their own tools and infrastructure to support co-marketing efforts. Aside from being highly cost-ineffective, this led to a panoply of redundant tools across geography and divisions, with no consistent look or message.

JGSullivan's Approach

• Understand limits of flexibility of templates. Given IBM's priority on brand protection, all templates were designed to carefully manage the dealer's level of customization.
• Support use in many countries and across all product lines. Understanding their regional and language needs, JGSullivan created a platform ultimately deployed in 10 different languages and 15 different locales. This provided lower costs overall, a uniformity of content, message and branding, and enabled sophisticated co-marketing efforts in areas which previously could not afford to create their own program.
• Develop new output formats to promote additional marketing channels. Traditional marketing materials focused on postcards and direct-mailers, but working with JGSullivan, the system was expanded to include e-mail templates, electronic mailers, telemarketing scripts, web banners, and letter templates.

Results

• Brand protection and reinforcement. While all pieces promoted the dealer's solutions and unique offers, a core message promoting IBM was always present as well.
• Improved marketing for partners. Not only did dealers have access to quality creative materials, they gained access to complete campaigns (ranging from print materials, to telemarketing to outbound e-mail programs) that often went well beyond what business partners could afford on their own.
• Hard data on response rates. JGSullivan incorporated response codes into the pieces which enabled concrete tracking for outcomes. This helped IBM and Ogilvy steer future efforts and ensure that scarce marketing dollars were spent as effectively as possible.