BrandSystems: Delivering creative solutions that can transform marketing execution and management processes

The marketing landscape has become more complex than ever before. The consumer is driving demand in engaging with brands and marketers must take full advantage of new media channels, segmentation strategies, and capabilities. Moreover, global companies continue to expand their brands and marketing requirements that causes the instances of miscommunication, poor execution, and misspent marketing funds to increase many times. This creates a high volume of work that also needs to be completed at a fast pace. Therefore, marketing executives are focusing on marketing resource management solutions to keep pace with the increasing and sophisticated demands on people, time, and budgets, in an effort to bring order to what can be a chaotic endeavor. This is where BrandSystems comes in to help manage marketing processes so that companies can be more agile in planning, management and execution on marketing campaigns while maintaining a consistent brand image across communication and marketing channels.

BrandSystems was founded in 1999 by an innovative group of professionals with a background in graphic design, advertising, marketing and branding. From the earliest days of MRM, they have designed the solutions that they would like to use, and over the past decade, their products have been tweaked and refined. This resulted in an elegant and sophisticated MRM Solution with the best graphic user interface on the market. BrandSystems specializes in solving marketing departments’ challenges by combining communication process skills with state of the art marketing technology.

We have the CEO Peter Svahn with us. Let’s hear it from him.

Can you brief us about the history of your company?

In the late 90’s, I was working as an Art Director, creating brand identity guidelines for multinational companies. Frustrated with the inefficiency of paper manuals and the high costs for my clients to distribute and update them, led me to start a new company and develop our first product: a “Brand Portal.”

A year later, BrandSystems was formed together with a group of likeminded investors. Over the next 14 years, creating client specific solutions for marketing departments grew our product portfolio to include several different marketing modules. Four years ago, the most valuable functions of our standalone modules were recoded and perfected in a single platform to be launched in the Cloud as BrandSystems Marcom Manager, a fully configurable SaaS solution.

Can you tell us about the market landscape? How do you position yourself in the domain?

Marketing Resource Management (MRM) is a software used by large and mid-sized companies to plan, budget and manage their global marketing efforts. First-time buyers are surveying a broader set of MRM competencies and examining the global impact of MRM initiatives, and the MRM veterans are looking to enhance their functionality, and expand globally, while consolidating prior purchases. Early buyers are re-evaluating their prior choices as the market matures.

According to American research and advisory firm Gartner, “BrandSystems is a Visionary on the basis of its broad and deepening set of MRM capabilities and its expanding geographical strategy.” and our slogan is “Pioneering Visionaries in Marketing Technology.” Our clients are companies that embrace the newest technologies available for marketing management. Being on the forefront of tech development is our challenge, and our pride.

What are your product and service offerings?

BrandSystems Marcom Manager is an all-inclusive MRM platform. It helps to plan, budget, collaborate, generate reports and media files, manage work flows and proofs. BrandSystems Marcom Manager is configured to your company’s specific needs and languages, and is access based to offer each of your users a work space that is easy to understand and easy to use.

What was your business’ mission statement? How has that mission evolved in the time since?

“More tool than rule” - meaning we wanted to keep all the rules a marketing department has to follow in the (software) tool itself, opening up time for the marketing professionals to do what they’re really good at: marketing. Today, the statement still holds true. Our goal in everything is to minimise tedious administration for marketing departments and maximise their return of marketing investment (ROMI). BrandSystems is also focused on constant streamlining of the business. Keeping unnecessary costs at a minimum helps us invest a large proportion into innovation, and has saved us from debt during years where the global economy was turbulent.

Who are your target clients? Can you share some of your client’s success stories?

Marketing departments of mid-sized and large companies and organizations are our target clients. Having been around for almost 20 years, we have had clients from all different sectors. If we were to highlight any specific sector, it will be our experience with banks, pharmaceutical and defence, since we’re cleared for their security levels; and multinational companies, since our platform can be run in any language (including Chinese) and has been built in multi-currency functionality.

Vattenfall, a European energy company, was one of our first clients to start using Marcom Manager. Lars Mossberg, Marketing Services Manager at Vattenfall AB said, “In the process of streamlining communications in a large enterprise, we need a supplier who provides support, services and function – as well as having a thorough understanding for modern marketing approached. BrandSystems supplies just this, and as they are also receptive, it makes the journey inspiring.” A similar client saved 25 million USD in marketing costs just in the first year of using BrandSystems Marcom Manager.

Let’s meet the visionary behind BrandSystems, CEO Peter Svahn

Peter Svahn (Founder and CEO) was born in Malmö, Sweden. He started his first business, Southern Sweden’s largest computer store at the time “Compro”, at the tender age of 15. Since then Peter has founded and run an array of different businesses. Ranging from magazines and marketing agencies to software development and creative labs, the common denominators have been Peter’s passions for tech, and the creative sides of marketing and publishing.

An innovator at heart, Peter also has patents in his name. After 15 years in Sweden’s capital city Stockholm, and almost a decade in Bangalore, India; Peter now lives with his wife and two children in Singapore, Singapore.

“BrandSystems MRM solution uniquely wraps sophisticated operations in a user-friendly design, making MRM accessible to users wherever they are.”