Marketing and production go hand-in-hand. One cannot exist without the other. These assets are worth more combined than separated. Yet, companies struggle to make the two function together, often planning more marketing campaigns than they can produce.
Boma is in business to streamline these operations. We believe that marketing and production activities can be broken down into discrete and repeatable tasks. If you have a good process in place and you do enough of these tasks, you can drive down costs and increase quality. Specialization and economies-of-scale become your competitive advantage. The problem at most companies is that they do not have enough critical mass to produce marketing output cheaply. No one specializes. Everything is an expensive, one-off activity.
At Boma, we are building an assembly line for marketing. Like Dell Computers, our products are made-to-order, but our parts and processes are highly standardized. To some marketing gurus, our approach heresy. To us, it’s just common sense.
We use certain methodologies to ensure quality and repeatability of our work. Here are three of them:
Reference Designs – All web sites fall into a fixed number of categories. We use reference designs to help clients quickly determine their preferences for structure, colors, motifs, navigation, imagery, and copy layout. This is a process that could take months at traditional agencies. And it’s certainly better than asking clients, “What car does your company resemble?”
Specialization – “Carmen, this month you’re going to design logos.” Our workers take turns specializing, so they can get deep into their craft. The productivity returns are enormous, because they become experts at their jobs, and they learn to work very fast.
Client Web Site – Our client site speeds up reviews and approvals. It has our work-in-progress with a complete set of production notes and project histories. Clients can review comps on their own schedule and forward pages to their colleagues. They find this much more efficient than massive, in-person presentations. No one has time these days to get ten people in the same room just to review a brochure design.
Reworks result in expensive delays. We minimize them by avoiding certain traps in the creative process:
Impressing the Wrong Crowd – Designers like to design for other designers, to the chagrin of clients who are paying the bills. This usually results in reworks, costing everyone a lot of money.
Old is Bad, New is Good – What’s old for a company may be new for clients. Marketing people like to change things for the sake of change. Web design is a good example.
Paranoia of Omission – The fear of leaving something out and getting “caught” by customers makes people want to put everything in. This is unnecesary and unproductive.
There are other rules we follow to keep our processes rolling. It does require a lot of internal training and discipline, but in the end it pays off.
A Word About the Status Quo
Marketing people and their highly-paid consultants are good at creating thick business plans, but give little attention to the execution side of the equation. My old boss at Interwoven used to tell me, “Ted, in this world, there are only two types of marketing people – thought leaders and producers. A company only needs a few thought leaders to plan strategy, but a lot of producers to get the work done.”
I’ve seen a lot of “executive initiatives” or “corporate initiatives” die for lack of producers. Many executives are out of touch with reality when it comes to resource planning. They simply ignore it. They manage by edict. A classic maneuver is to “revitalize” a company with a combination of downsizing and new business initiatives designed to increase sales. The problem is, who’s going to do all the work? The popular belief is that, with all the computers and automation at their disposal, the work will get done. Far from it. “White collar” work is as labor-intensive as ever. Computers alone cannot do the writing, design, programming and QA. People have to do these tasks.
That’s where Boma comes in. We are the production experts. We have economies of scale and location that allow us to offer high-quality services at very affordable prices. Our assembly line approach is changing the way marketing and production sevices are delivered.
Ted Fong, General Manager, has worked in high-tech marketing for most of his career. He was Director of Marketing at Interwoven, Inc, an nterprise software company, where he ran marketing communications and web operations. He also worked for Cognex Corporation and Alcatel North Asia Pacific. Mr. Fong has a BS in bioengineering from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from UCLA. http://www.bomacorp.com
