MRM
Obsessively Focused on Driving Business Results

It is not unusual to say that a company is squarely focused on the client. In the same vein, companies are often committed to driving measurable business results for clients by fostering meaningful relationships with their people. The latter represents a breed of companies wherein being customer-centric goes way beyond than just offering a good product and support service. Customer-centricity becomes a cultural way of life in these companies, allowing them to live and breathe their customers. However, customer-centricity has many forms. At MRM, it’s an obsession—a healthy one.

With its capability to laser focus on clients’ business growth goals the global agency has gained a reputation for providing strategy, consulting and delivery services that help drive measureable business outcomes. MRM specializes in digital marketing, direct marketing, advertising, CRM, data analytics, and Marketing Technology to help transform businesses, by enabling brands to grow meaningful relationships with people. As a part of IPG and a top agency in the McCann World group network, with more than 35 offices across North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific, MRM helps clients to keep up with the modern consumer with high-octane marketing strategies and deep-rooted knowledge of martech and commerce solutions.

MRM brings its technology, data, commerce, and innovation capabilities together in an integrated way to deliver against the clients’ needs. The company also helps clients glean and activate data and insights in the right way to drive relevant creative content, and thus power intelligent ecosystems. “We do this by bringing together our understanding of people, their relationships with brands, and our deep technical specialisms in world-class martech and commerce solutions, such as Salesforce,” says Jayna Kothary, Global Chief Technology Officer at MRM.

MRM leverages Salesforce technology to humanize interactions between the brands and the consumers—at scale, with efficiency and at an ROI that is acceptable in today’s business context. The marketing agency assists customers to create maximum value from their investment in Salesforce Technology and partners with them from strategy and consulting, through design and implementation. These partnerships are often long-term in nature, allowing MRM to run operations and enable data-led optimization.

To add more perspective to the services offered by MRM, Jayna cites the challenges faced by the hotel industry, for instance. She stresses that 75 percent of the hotel booking transactions are abandoned in the first steps of the purchase funnel. The traditional solution is for brands to use paid media and retargeting solutions on a massive scale to get the user back to the sales funnel starting point—that could be either the homepage or product page. Similar was the case of Barceló Hotel Group—one of the most important multinational hotel and travel groups in the world, operating across Europe, America and Africa with over 240 hotels in 22 countries.

Barceló Hotel Group had Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud as its CRM and campaign management solution but did not leverage their full capacity. MRM crafted a data-driven, multi-channel customer engagement strategy between owned and paid channels, to enhance personalization and boost digital transactions. With Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Barceló is now taking advantage of communication automation, building personalized paths for each client based on digital attributes collected across the online sales funnel.

Using the technology available, MRM made digital data flow from Tealium Audience Stream to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to generate highly personalized email experiences, which helped to grow digital transactions. The results have been impressive—Barceló experienced a more than 69 percent increase in OR and over 312
percent in CTOR. The traffic is driven to the client’s ecommerce platform increase by 20 percent, and D2C digital sales soared by over 30 percent.

Innovation at the Core

Success stories as such highlight the noteworthy business results that MRM has yielded for its clients. These successes are essentially fueled by MRM’s unmatched experience and innovative services and approaches. With a sharp focus on integration and an API-first mindset, MRM is currently investing in building a suite of accelerators and connectors to support large-scale complex deployments at pace. The suite also addresses critical customer experience needs stemming from the convergence of areas like content and commerce.

In addition to partnering with Tier 1 stacks like Salesforce, MRM also collaborates with startups and SMEs to fill gaps and create a competitive advantage for clients, leveraging a proprietary approach developed by its global innovation labs–LAB13 by MRM. This service from MRM pairs rapid ideation, design thinking, prototyping and experience testing to invent new products, services and businesses that transform customer relationships into people-centric ecosystems, 18 months ahead of the market.

LAB13 is utilized to quickly turn insights into action obtained from MRM’s unique and proprietary Relationship Mapping™ capability. This approach helps map human connections and reveal human truths vital to a business’s understanding of its customers’ emotions, motivations and actions. “We believe this is a critical foundation and framework that directs where we invest, and how we communicate and engage with customers,” adds Jayna.

Putting Relationships First Make Them Last

Keeping the clients’ growth goal in mind, MRM offers end-to-end services that ideally begins with the customer. MRM focuses on every interaction the customers have with the brands and deliver consistently meaningful and impactful experiences across every touchpoint. Jayna informs, “We engineer their experiences to deliver against today’s customer expectations—respecting their time, convenience, needs and purchase experience.” Before jumping onto technology implementations, the company’s strategy and consulting services help clients with their long-term vision, goals, and clear KPIs that support their business goals or the operating model.

These consulting services include target operating model definition, visioning, technology stack design, vendor selection and more. It is imperative to note that MRM draws on its deep understanding of people and brands to surface the core business questions, the human truths, and therefore, design the technology approach accordingly. “This technology is the way to make the customer-facing experience as good as it can be. This is very different to the traditional SI approach,” extols Jayna.

The uniqueness of MRM also stems from its globally-connected, borderless network that caters to clients with best-in-class capabilities from anywhere in the world. With a deep talent pool of technology and business leaders across the globe, MRM brings the much-needed agility to the table to craft personalized solutions for its clients, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

As for the company’s immediate roadmap, Jayna concludes, “We see joint solution development with our partners, an eye on new entrants and capabilities, and our data science practice as core to our growth. The hybrid on- and offshore model continues to be a part of our forward strategy.”