Blog

What are your plans for the first week of June?

Mine have me in Budapest, Hungary, to join our global PROKOM community on June 6^th and 7^th. This second annual PROKOM Conference, hosted by Konica Minolta, will take place on the banks of the Danube River. (more…)

More Control to Anticipate Your Return on Investment

Marketing ROI, a concept that so many companies struggle with today.  As we try to determine the value of our marketing, one of the key questions is “How am I going to define marketing ROI?” Marketing managers, executives and brand owners – across the spectrum of experience – find that anticipating return on investment (ROI) can be challenging.  Decisions regarding plans, staffing, buying decisions, priorities and budget often streamline from various sources, which may or may not work in a complementary fashion toward the same end goal.

Planning and Projections

Proposing strategy and planning – whether seasonal, annual, one-off or otherwise – needs a unified approach to maximize outcomes and in my experience, this process remains rather outdated in most marketing groups.  To understand marketing ROI, companies should take a holistic approach and consider Total Cost of Marketing (TCM), the process of examining all aspects of marketing effort. TCM is the combination of time, resources, and budget used to plan, execute and analyze a marketing campaign.

Technology can now help bridge the communication gap across the departments that play into those decisions. If you had the opportunity to layer in program tactics, costs, timelines and staffing and see whether your programs would deliver for you, would you try that? Envision the marketing analytics that could tell you – beforehand – that your programs are understaffed or overbudgeted or could provide additional return for a small incremental budget build. Using technology to bridge this communication gap can help ensure that your big-budget programs’ marketing dollars are directly spent to impact change and bottom-line business.

Analytics and Adjustments

At the end of the day, we most often rely upon experience, hard work and guidance — and sometimes, even a little bit of luck — for campaigns to hit their mark. In truth though, there are so many variables that can de-rail even the best laid plans. Catching up as plans falter or shift is difficult to do. Whether middle of a campaign or near the end, it’s important for marketers to have all information needed to make the best decisions and create the greatest impact. Entering real-time data and seeing how all elements intersect across your program’s timeline and end-goal, can provide powerful insights about timing and anticipated outcomes. Seeing issues in workflows and tactical performance as they arise, or even before they arise, can provide huge cost savings, ensure your budget dollars are allocated appropriately, and help achieve the greatest ROI.

Controlling Your Marketing Mix

It’s time we move away from investigating problems in hindsight and take advantage of new opportunities to set a campaign in the right direction from the start. With new planning and analytics tools for marketing, see how all of your marketing program tactics line up and anticipate the effectiveness and performance of your plans before you activate. At Konica Minolta, I’m proud to support the launch of a revolutionary marketing planning and analytics tool, Domino Decisions^TM, delivering the data you need to prepare smart marketing campaigns across media platforms with top returns.

This offering comes from Konica Minolta’s Industrial Print and Graphic Communications Marketing Services platform and the beauty of the program is that it can be implemented into literally any environment. As an aggregate marketing analytics tool, Domino Decisions can mine the information it needs from your existing technology (Konica Minolta or otherwise) to improve upon your marketing efficiencies.

At Konica Minolta, we are going into our third year of incorporating Domino Decisions to our own comprehensive marketing approach to ROI by implementing technology and processes that help us see and understand our campaigns from launch to analytics.  Whether it’s a new product launch, a large tradeshow, or a regional innovation showcase, the marketing team is able to view the complete campaign or one of the many tactics within the campaign, such as email, social media, or direct mail.  In addition to greater visibility, we’ve reduced our time needed for monthly marketing calendars and measurement reports from days to hours. By having this end-to-end visibility, we are able to quickly support and manage on-going changes that occur when executing multiple omni-channeling marketing campaigns.

For brand managers, an investment in planning and analytics can re-direct time, resources and budget dollars with a marketing mix that garners more impressions and turns around your expected campaign’s return on investment. See more about this incredible tool at Konica Minolta.

Konica Minolta Steps Forward with Confidence and Support

I’ve written before about diversity in the workplace and am proud to see strides taken within Konica Minolta to ensure that our people, and our community not only accept all people for who they are – in gender, in race, in age and in creative thought – but also recognize the important role that different thought leadership plays into our overall success.

Diversity Makes a Difference

A Forbes article on this subject (coined “inclusive decision making”) highlights better business performance with teams that incorporate variety in age, gender and geography. (more…)

The K-12 learning environment has had a big year of change with regard to the incorporation of emerging technology (think: augmented reality and virtual reality). We also expect to see a fascinating year ahead, with education institutions putting more basic solutions in place as the necessary building blocks for greater technological innovations. I’ve recently reviewed eSchool Media’s Annual Trends Report: 25 Trends for 2018^[1] and am thrilled to see that expert educational opinions about trends across the nation mirror what we, at Konica Minolta see in terms of technology integration taking place in education this year.

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The evolution of document management is astounding.  When I was growing up, I handwrote my homework until I had access to a typewriter at my mother’s real estate office. What a treat to type  my reports for school!  They looked so professional. What could beat that?! Enter home computers. My father’s and grandparents’ computers were the holy grail of my homework experience. I no longer had to use white-out to correct my mistakes or start over entirely. Plus, I could save  my work inside  of a computer?! Amazing! (more…)

Change is in the Air: Transformation Underway

Konica Minolta has always been a brand with transformation and change as part of its DNA, ingrained in the company culture. From having a Minolta camera on the first American manned shuttle that went into space in 1962, to releasing the world’s first 35 mm camera with auto focus in 1977, we have had many world firsts. As our CEO Shoei Yamana mentioned in a recent interview with the Financial Times, innovation at Konica Minolta has historically been focused on ‘over engineering’ our products. In times of stability, such product innovations absolutely have their place. However, today our traditional market place has shrunk dramatically. For Konica Minolta to retain market relevancy, we have to shift our focus to customer value. It is definitely a very different focus to “how can we make our products better.” And so, over the last four years, Konica Minolta’s innovative journey has been accelerating like never before. With the establishment of our Business Innovation Centers, expansion of our R&D facilities globally, and our acquisitions, Konica Minolta is closer than ever to our clients. All this is supporting Konica Minolta’s transformation into a leading edge IT Services business. (more…)

Is Monochrome Printing Dead?

To answer this affirmatively would be like saying the world could only be seen in color. Think of photographer Ansel Adams, who was able to express a wide range of bold, expressive tones in his classic black-and-white American landscapes and scenic photographs. We believe that the simplicity and functional purpose of monochrome printing will always remain a portion of the marketplace, just as there will always be a place for the timeless beauty of classic black–and-white imagery in our wide world of color.

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As you prepare for HIMSS 2018, and do a cursory review of all the companies that will exhibit, you will most likely see a variety of themes addressing everything from improving patient care to lowering costs and many things in between.  But one theme – The Quiet Revolution of Digital Healthcare – is a bit different than the rest of the pack, and may take a moment to resonate.  It happens to be the theme for my company, Konica Minolta.  However, the meaning behind this statement became clearer to me this week.

We had a presentation to a large health system in southern California while describing our contribution to the digital health ecosystem and the many different solutions and services we provide as a company in the healthcare IT space. Following the presentation, our client stated, “I never really connected Konica Minolta with healthcare business solutions, but you obviously do an awful lot more than I realized.  It became evident that we have been quietly flying under the radar in terms of the dynamic value proposition we can offer to our client. (more…)

Just 26 days into the New Year, Konica Minolta made an unprecedented announcement: For the eleventh consecutive year, we were named Number One in Customer Loyalty in the 2018 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index in the “MFP Copier” category. Eleven years in a row. What a way to begin a new year.

But what does this mean? And what are we doing so successfully to earn this amazing distinction? (more…)

In 2010, Konica Minolta implemented a vertical marketing strategy and hired individuals like myself who were not from the office technology arena but whose expertise was in fields such as legal, healthcare, government, education, among others. Since that time, we have seen many of our dealers follow suit with vertical markets for their business. (more…)