An Exclusive Interview with Jerome Fontaine, Global CEO & Marketing Performance Chief of Fournaise – The Marketing Effectiveness Tracker & Booster^®

“70% of Marketing Strategies & Campaigns Under-Perform and Fail to Deliver the Expected Business Results”

“We are 100 percent focused on helping CEOs and Marketers push their Marketing to achieve higher effectiveness and ROI, to generate better (measurable) business results: more customer demand, more sales, more market share.”

Fournaise is one of the world’s leading Marketing Effectiveness Tracking & Boosting (METB) companies. Using its proprietary METB technology, solutions, and models, Fournaise has over the last 15 years tracked and boosted the effectiveness of more than 2.5 million marketing strategies, products, programs, campaigns and ads, across 20 countries, 13 industries (B2C & B2B) and 18 languages, for Fortune 500 companies, SMEs and top advertising agencies – to help them generate more customer demand for their products and/or services.

Fournaise has been named by The Silicon Review as one of 50 Innovative Companies to Watch in 2019.

We talked to Fournaise’s Global CEO and Marketing Performance Chief (MPC), Jerome Fontaine, to gain insights into how Fournaise’s suite of innovative solutions has been helping businesses generate incremental customer demand.

Q. SR - Jerome, what are some challenges CEOs face with respect to generating Incremental Customer Demand (to boost their Top & Bottom Line)?

Fontaine: Over the last 11 years, we’ve been running a Global Marketing Effectiveness Tracking program (across the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific) to (a) better understand Marketers around the world (what they think their job is, how effective they are, what type of results they deliver) and (b) better understand what CEOs expect of these Marketers.

When we ask CEOs around the world what is their number one business objective, their answer is generally very consistent: to grow their P&L’s Top Line (and consequently the Bottom Line) through a combination of acquiring new customers and getting current customers to buy from and/or spend more with their business, more often. Which in turn means they are very aware of their business needs to generate incremental customer demand for their products/services, i.e. more interest and more desire for their products/services – that can thereafter be converted into incremental sales.

Who should be leading that demand generation push? 80 percent of CEOs expect their Marketers to generate incremental customer demand for their organisations’ products/services. That’s true in both large enterprises and SMEs.

However, and in the same breath, 73 percent of these CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be. Why? Because they are still too far from being able to unquestionably and scientifically demonstrate how the marketing strategies, programs, activities and campaigns they deploy grow their organisations’ top line in terms of generating more customer demand for their products/services. That’s why more and more growth-driven CEOs and Senior Management are turning to Marketing Effectiveness specialists like us, to push their marketing to generate better business results, in a measurable, quantifiable, unquestionable way.

SR - How does Fournaise help businesses generate incremental customer demand?

Fontaine: At Fournaise, we are 100 percent focused on helping CEOs, Senior Management and Marketers push their marketing (Products, Pricing, Channel and Communication) to generate better business results: more demand, more sales, more market share, more customers, and/or more prospects.

For this, we apply our proprietary 360-degree, All-In-One Marketing Effectiveness Tracking & Boosting (METB) Model: We Track. We Analyse. We Feed. We Advise. We call this “Performance-Tracking as a Service”, or PTaaS.

This means that using our proprietary Marketing Effectiveness Tracking & Boosting (METB) technology solutions, combined with our solid, global and multi-industry marketing expertise we track and measure what works, what does not, where, on which audience and, very importantly, we understand why – covering Products, Pricing, Channel, Communications, and Brand. We do this across 20+ countries worldwide, 13 industries (B2C & B2B) and 18 languages, as mentioned above.

From there, we advise Senior Management and Marketers on the strategic and tactical corrective actions they should take to push their marketing to deliver better results, effectiveness, and ROI.

Our PTaaS Model is built around Three Pillars:

Pillar 1 — Nine Proprietary Technology Solutions

Marketing Effectiveness Tracking & Boosting is a complex multidimensional game of optimisation. To best identify and fix the effectiveness issues faced by our clients, we have developed a unique problem-specific, optimisation-focused suite of nine proprietary technology solutions organised into five proprietary categories:

• Audience Tracking Optimisation (ATO) & Product Effectiveness Audit (PEA);
  
  
• Product, CVP & Message Effectiveness Optimisation™ (PMEO™);
  
  
• Creative Effectiveness Tracking & Optimisation (CETO);
  
  
• Campaign Performance Tracking & Optimisation (CPTO); and
  
  
• Brand Performance Tracking & Optimisation (BPTO).

Pillar 2 — 100% Science-based and 100% Data-driven

No gut-feeling, no hear-say, and no half-baked data: everything we do is based on solid HiQuant data directly captured from our clients’ target audience, and analysed through our proprietary science-based models and methodologies.

Pillar 3 — We Are Marketing Experts

Technology and data alone are not enough – you need the right brains and the right expertise to best make sense of the performance results and provide the most relevant effectiveness-boosting recommendations. Our Senior Management team has a solid business and marketing global track record, having successfully held senior marketing positions (such as CMO & VP Marketing) and worked and successfully delivered solid, unquestionable business growth results for/with some of the biggest companies in the world, including Fortune 500 organisations and top advertising and communications networks. In other words, we walk the talk.

SR - If there is one thing you would advise CEOs and Marketers to do, to generate more customer demand, what would it be?

Fontaine: They need to market more effective products/services, and they need to tell more effective product stories.

Over the last 15 years, we tracked that close to 70 percent of marketing strategies and campaigns that were deployed – under-performed and failed to deliver the business results expected of them.

There are many reasons to explain these failures, but here is the most critical one: Weak, Ineffective, Under-performing Customer Value Propositions (CVPs).

At Fournaise, we have a saying: “in the tyre industry they say power is nothing without control; in the marketing industry, form is nothing without the right content”.

If the product, service or message (i.e. the content) you are marketing, pushing or advertising is not engaging with and not effective on your target audience, then whatever creativity, media strategy, in-store activity or direct, social and digital marketing activity you deploy, will fail to deliver the level of interest, desire and subsequently action you are looking for from your target audience.

To fix this issue, we have developed one of the most innovative Marketing Effectiveness Tracking & Boosting (METB) solutions on the market: Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® — it falls into our proprietary Product, CVP & Message Effectiveness Optimisation™ (PMEO™) category, and is engineered to Build More Effective Products & More Effective Product Stories™.

Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® is 100% science- and scorecard-based:

• Using our proprietary CVP Categorization methodology, we first dissect and analyse the products/services our clients want us to focus on, and develop a comprehensive list of CVP Options organised into multiple types: we cover current features and innovations – also including pricing, channel, packaging, customer service, and more;
  
  
• Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® will run these CVP options on the audience segments our clients want to target – it’s able to tackle any target audience type, across 20+ countries worldwide and 18 languages (European, Asian, Middle Eastern and other languages);
  
  
• And from there, using a special algorithm, Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® will automatically and scientifically track, measure, compare and identify the most effective CVPs, build a Winning CVP Architecture^® for the product/service in question, and thereafter develop the related Optimised Product Story® that will (again, scientifically) give our clients’ products, services or messages the best chance to engage with and be effective on their target audience.

Our clients use Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® at various stages of their products’ lifecycle – at Product Development, Introduction, Growth, Maturity and even Decline. It helps them scientifically develop:

• More effective new products before launching them in the market;
  
  
• More effective product regeneration, product renovation and product enhancement strategies;
  
  
• More effective innovation roadmaps.

Our clients also use Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® for their marketing communications – helping them push for higher effectiveness in what they are saying (i.e. messages) and how they are saying it in their product packaging, advertising, public relations, etc. to best trigger and engage with their target audience.

Our Senior Management & Marketer clients have rated Fournaise CVPOptimiser^® as the best, sharpest and most innovative ‘Product Story Telling’ solution & tool on the market.

About Jerome Fontaine

Jerome Fontaine is the Global CEO and Marketing Performance Chief of Fournaise.

Fournaise has operations around the world, including US, Europe & Asia Pacific.

Contact Fournaise:

www.fournaisegroup.com