Business Case
MNP definition
'A rigorous process for the selection of communication options which combines facts and imagination in order to drive continual improvement to overall ROI'.
MNP definition
- Optimises communication potential
- Enhances both effectiveness and efficiency in both process and communication.
- Marries science and art, economics and imagination
- Based on a new way of thinking and tools
- Re-launches the client-agency contract
- Embraces the whole organisation and every Touchpoint
- Activates new concepts of media and of the communication disciplines
- Defines new evaluation methodology
- Is a key enabler of the overall integrated marketing objective: aligning communication and organisation
Excellence in MNP depends on some pre-requisites, such as knowledge of customers, good brand insights and appropriate value propositions. It is regarded by the MNP group as overall cost-neutral and result positive: the overall cost of MNP practice should be no more or less than pre-MNP.
Marketing axioms on which MNP stands
- The more a company has a real, clear, differentiated core value the more benefit they will get from marketing communication
- The ROI from over-investment in any single medium eventually declines with further investment
- There is a media-multiplier effect: media working together outperform media in competition or silos
- There is a discipline-multiplier effect: discipline working together outperform disciplines in competition or silos
- People working together outperform people in competition/conflict
- Communication merely copied to different media is not necessarily integrated, it is just replicated
- Marketing communications need a critical mass in order to be effective
- Singe-medium campaigns can still be media neutral
The group projects a potential value of £4 billion to £10 billion in UK industry alone based on appropriate action and change.
Source of MNP benefits
- Improved business cost (efficiency)
- Improved employee motivation and alignment (psychological effects)
- Improved business performance (effectiveness)
- Improved customer value proposition (creative design, mission)
- Better media-mix selection (budget efficiency)
- Improved Touchpoint management (CRM effects)
- Media-multiplier effect (harmonisation)
- Improved communication relevance
- Improved customer bonding Рacquisition, share of wallet, and retention (satisfaction, psychological effects)
- Improved customer brand equity (social pressure, market equity, price differentials)
- Lifetime financial effects (time effects)
- Improved analyst perceptions (shareholders equity).
The group noted that while many observers agreed with the need for change there was a widespread problem when it came to identifying how to do it. Many of the solutions merely repeated the problems or addressed part of the problem. Indeed, the name 'media neutral' had problems in as much as it tended to over emphasise media within the communication planning process and also to privilege 'advertising media' over other communication contacts.
The recommendations for change that follow are therefore based on a comprehensive and pragmatic method for implementing the many objectives that have been collected under the MNP umbrella, which we describe as Open Planning.