Kodak's Bill Sullivan Blog

Cross Channel Marketing: What’s The Best Way To Make A Start?

Anyone can set up a new business as a multi-channel marketing services supplier. Well, not quite anyone. You’d need to have some resources and some kind of vision about how you wanted to operate and where you wanted to get to. But the basic task of setting up from scratch would be relatively simple to plan and execute.

What is always going to be harder is moving in this direction from within an established business, with customers to be managed, plant to be utilized, staff to be deployed, and bills to be paid. In some cases, the road ahead may seem fairly obvious. In others, the best advice may be the traditional countryman’s observation: “If you want to get there, I wouldn’t be starting from here.”

So can you do it? And if so, how?

Any generalizations I offered now would inevitably be too broad to be much use, in practical terms. But I would claim that there is one very pragmatic, realistic innovation we have come up with at Kodak that can help enormously. This is the idea of a transformation assessment process that can give detailed, specific advice to a company that is toying with the idea of making this kind of strategic change.

We’ve done these assessments many times now, and they work very well. If a company does seem like a promising candidate for transformation into a cross-media marketing powerhouse, the assessment will provide much of the background data and analysis that will feed into the transition process. If the assessment shows there are insuperable difficulties, the advice not to go ahead may save the business from putting its head in a noose.

Assessments are not free. But if you saw the level of effort and resources involved, that would not surprise you at all. In terms of their significance to a business, they are an absolute bargain.

Our experts do the job properly. They spend a lot of time on site, talk to people, look at where the company is, from a business, sales, and operations standpoint, and produce a report that highlights strengths and weaknesses in sometimes astonishing detail. The cost of the assessment depends on the size and complexity of the business, but  I have yet to meet anyone who has been through the process who doesn’t feel it was well worth the money.