Thinking About Excluding a Vendor from Your Next Marketing Campaign?

We’re all reminded on a daily basis that consumer spending continues to struggle. To maintain market share, some companies are expanding their marketing activities while a few are standing still with hope that this storm will pass any day. Poor souls! Since this downturn seems different than previous ones, it makes sense that we test out new approaches/techniques. If you need proof that companies are indeed “thinking outside of the box,” look no further than OfficeMax shifting their marketing focus to target women.

As you’re thinking about a new marketing ad campaign, you will likely face the dilemma of selecting a new software package or vendor. And as you start comparing solutions, you will surely run into that one sales executives that will tell that you should avoid a competing offering because they’re about to go out of business. It’s a common tactic, especially in this kind of economy — some companies are failing unfortunately. So how can you tell whether there’s substance behind those statements?

As a trusted adviser, I’m asked that question on a regular basis. Recently, I’ve come across a headline that made me stop and think whether I’d still include a Content Management Vendor in the selection process. In this case, I’ve gone beyond reading the headlines and tried to dig the truth about that vendor.

Enterprise Content Management Solution Vendor Vignette Pre-announces Poor Earnings

In late December, a business blog posted news that Vignette would cut their workforce. Following the post, Vignette pre-announced that their forth quarter earnings would fall far short of investor expectations. In the pre-announcement, the President and CEO of Vignette indicated that uncertainty of business climate in 2009 led the company to company to take these steps. As the news spread, initial speculation grew that Vignette was headed lower because competitors, like Interwoven, released news of a great 4th Quarter.

I reached out to Vignette last week  to Melanie Brenneman, Vignette’s Public Relations Manager, and Gerardo Dada, Senior Director of Product Marketing, and spoke to them about the future of Vignette.

Mr. Dada clarified that Vignette is continuing to improve their base architecture while also paying attention to customer support. For example, version 7.6 of Vignette Content Management Suite (VCM) recently incorporated 250 customer improvement requests. Mr. Dada also explained that product improvements are collected on a regular basis from customer meet-ups (or discussions), internal forums and reviews by internal advisory boards. These updates are then prioritized for future releases.

To ensure that Vignette remains competitive, Mr. Dada explained that the company is focused on launching new applications that are relevant to today’s marketers. For example, Vignette product suite now includes key marketing applications such as:

• Video Content Publishing and Management
  
• Content Search via Vignette’s Taxonomy and Advanced Search
• Social Community Applications

These applications are important for marketers if they want to improve user experience on the website and/or encourage two-way dialogue with their customers.

In my opinion, Vignette has all of the right tools in their war chest but are missing one component — better marketing. To improve that, Mr. Dada explained that Vignette will restart their marketing machine in the next two weeks with the launch of a blog.

So while earnings are down, don’t count Vignette out!

[UPDATE: Interwoven filed with the SEC an announcement that they'll likely cut approximately 7% of their workforce this year (70 employee positions out of 1,012 employees worldwide).]

Tags: cms, economy, Social Media, vignette

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 7:34 am and is filed under Digital, Technology & Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.