by Herman Manson (@marklives) Oscar Tango Marketing has been relaunched as a specialist CRM agency called Kaffeine. According to managing partner, Alistair Irving, the agency will marry creatively smart work with hitting the commercial bottom line, plus ensuring measurable return on investment for clients.
Irving was abroad for 12 years, working at G2 Worldwide in London (global group account director: Kent — a premium British American Tobacco brand) and as global brand development director for Lucky Strike. He then spent a year with G2 Moscow, working on the domestic BAT business. Back in South Africa, he spent just over a year as group managing director at Gloo Digital Design before joining Oscar Tango Marketing in late 2013.
Irving believes brands and agencies should use technology and data to build a more-intimate understanding of consumers which offers both parties long-term value. Agencies, he says, are engaged in too much frivolous activity that doesn’t improve sales or business performance. He believes brands can achieve more with less and allocate resources more effectively.
Launched in 1998
Oscar Tango Marketing was launched by the late Don Paul in 1998. Irving says that, in many ways, Oscar Tango was Paul, and the core of the business has always been CRM. Kaffeine takes that specialist knowledge and builds in more rigour to make it more relevant to the market.
The team of 12 might constitute a small group of people but they have big dreams, asserts Irving. CRM for them should facilitate better integration, drive accountability and a real understanding of ROI.
Current clients include Levi’s, for which Kaffeine manages its Pan-African integrated communications and its loyalty programme in SA. It also works across all the three GM SA brands — Chevrolet, Opel and Isuzu — where it manages all lead-generation strategy formulation and campaign creation for all data-driven marketing activity.
“In addition to lead generation, we also manage the full customer life-cycle communications, which are sent out at various key touchpoints within an owner’s life-cycle with each brand,” he adds. “We have also embarked on various data enrichment and segmentation exercises across the brands, to develop greater insight and understanding of who each customer is and how they behave. We have worked with GM for over five years now.”
Top of mind
The Johnson & Johnson Pharmacy Academy, an Advocacy Programme now in its fourth year, helps ensure that seven of Johnson & Johnson’s key over-the-counter brands are kept top of mind by pharmacists and pharmacy assistants. This year, the programme has developed into three different streams, and a new launch into Nigeria will also be achieved this year.
His ambition for Kaffeine is an agency that is strategically led but famous for response-driven creative, rather than simply short-term campaign-based creative.
Irving acknowledges that educating the market about the real value of CRM is a key challenge. He is of the opinion that it can be effectively used to form a more-intimate understanding of individuals, and that that knowledge can be built into business intelligence and used in effective channel- and messaging solutions.
For consumers, it will mean more relevant, timely and respectful communication. Ultimately, the marketer and its clients enter a trust relationship, and Irving will challenge brands to become more loyal to its customers (rather than the other way around, which is currently the industry standard).
Consumer-centric
Irving believes innovation and R&D should become more consumer-centric — ultimately consumer attitudes and motivations should inform how brands innovate.
Herman Manson (@marklives) is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com.
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