The problems with this kind of system for Marketing are 2-fold:

1. The assumptions above don’t always hold true; that is a culture thing. Surprisingly, #2 is often a problem. You need rational players that understand the economics and are not afraid to play win / lose. In a long established firm, this is near impossible to achieve without a gutting.

2. Requires significant analytical / monitoring infrastucture, as you can well imagine. Without a clear and confident vision of the contribution a system like this can make, this infra probably would not get built.

I will be addressing these issues with an alternative approach in a future post, an easier way to accomplish the same outcome. But I thought it was crucial for folks to understand the core “Marketing marketplace” idea – even if impractical with today’s infra.

Some of these Marketing Operations / Resource Management software companies are beginning to explore this marketplace idea, since (in theory) they have all the data to make a marketplace work and can use internal rulesets to help with managing it.

Still, this one idea that a channel or division has certain “rights” to a new customer for some period of time before other channels / divisions can market to the customer is a real issue that many companies could act on right now.  It is simply unfair, economically, for one channel to bear the cost of acquiring the customer just to have other channels milk the downstream value of the customer.  This can cause budget misallocations over the long term that don’t work out well for the company overall.

The horror stories I could tell on that one issue would curl your toes…

I’m quite sure you know, but what you’ve described is much like the internal charging that IT groups often do to ensure quality flows both to the client as well as a brake on out of control spending. Well… in theory anyway. ;-)

And I can clearly see a real plus for any organisation that does this. You end up with the various marketing groups (channels if you will) being in competition with each other. Competition to *succeed*; ie retain better value etc etc clients. And thus gain an extra budget bonus from the internal “selling” and on it goes.

Very powerful! Done right this could deliver an actual culture of marketing excellence, vs an “excellent” talk-fest about having a marketing culture. :-P

Cheers!
- Steve