India set to become world's marketing back office?

CHENNAI, INDIA: The looming recession in the US and growing inflation might not have gone down well with India, but that has not dented the confidence of those who are visualizing newer business models and keen on generating fresher revenue streams.

After shifting recruitment and legal back office jobs to India, the world has now realized yet another potential of the country: Marketing Process Outsourcing.

Vinod Harith, founder and director of CMO Axis, states: “Outsourcing to India has been maturing rapidly and we have been seeing that global organizations have been experimenting with moving more mature processes like legal or recruitment back offices to India. I have been speaking to several global and Indian CMOs for sometime now and I realized that many of them are under pressure to deliver more with shrinking budgets and outsourcing.”

He hints at the fact that offshoring of marketing services would be the next logical step for these companies, as stated by Jeff Lande, senior vice president of the IT Association of America.

Lande has earlier said, “Many have, or are beginning to realize, that taking advantage of expert marketing and related support functions wherever they reside is one way to achieve this goal.”

Is there a need?



A First Research report has projected the market for outsourced graphic design services in the US alone is in the range of $8 billion, out of which the top 50 companies accounted for less than 20 per cent of the industry revenues.

Interestingly, most of these companies in this bracket were firms that were small, possessed single location shops and employed less than four people with average revenue of $500,000 and about 30 per cent of the graphic designers were self employed, giving opportunity for off-shoring to a specialized and scalable outfit.

If one glances over the challenges faced by organizations in general, the marketing deliverables seems to be shooting up, but the bandwidth and budgets are coming down.

There is a need to extend the team in order to accomplish the marketing objectives. Also, the current outsourcing partners seldom bring the practitioners view to the table and a requirement to work with people who have done this before was felt.

First move advantage

While necessity from time immemorial was the mother of inventions, companies such as CMO Axis gets the opportunity to have a first move advantage to tap this part of the potential in the market. It brings a flexible and predictable approach to outsourcing and has a choice of scalable, secure and predictable engagement models.

However, the road is not without its share of potholes. For starters, the market would have to in the SME (small and mid-level enterprises) space, a segment, which would take its time to come to terms with this new phenomenon.

Harith is optimistic when he says, “They (SME) need access to marketing best practices and programs that have worked for larger organizations as they focus on growing exponentially.”

Areas of expertise



Outsourcing of marketing services has long been associated with PR or advertising or offshoring of peripheral processes such as research, MIS or analytics.

The core processes in marketing such as email marketing and demand generation, content and marketing communication, thought leadership and new media strategies are areas for remote delivery with our country world class skills combined with a cost savings of over 60 per cent, the proposition looks mouth watering.

Harith feels blogs marketing, thought leadership marketing and social networks/ second life marketing are the three key areas that will drive awareness and demand generation for Indian companies.

“We are one of the few professionals in India who have done extensive work in this space and will harness these channels to deliver business results for our customers,” he states.

This new wave has already started to create ripples and it would not be long before India becomes the marketing back office for the world.