SAP: PART B – CASE ANALYSIS

Group 6
Kathiravan | Niharika | Niranand

Q1. Analyse the impact of Homlish’s marketing and branding efforts on SAP performance
Ans 1. After SAPPHIRE conference, SAP was known much better by analysts. In 2001, SAP
was on BusinessWeek’s top 100 brands and delivered on theme: The best run e-business run
SAP.
After McDermott arrived, the company posted 13 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth
and increased profitability after he used the brand promise as a focal point in developing a vision
and formed a new Value Engineering Business team.
After brand workshops were conducted and brand ambassadors were chosen, the employees
were able to define SAP as a business organization rather than a tech organization.
Between 2000-2005 its brand value rose by 46% and its profit grew by 202% and its global
market share became 21%. Financial results of companies listed in NASDAQ and NYSE showed
that companies which use SAP were 32% more profitable than those which don’t run SAP.
Separate momentum campaign was run for midmarket customers which involved series of ads
and few midmarket customers were also incorporated into the campaign. All this resulted in
255% growth in software installations worldwide, from 25,000 in 1999 to 88,700 in 2004.

Q2. What steps did Homlish take to create superior customer value?
Ans2. Homlish followed a structured approach to create a superior customer value
 Homlish was assertive to create a new brand positioning for SAP. SAP was passionate
about customer’s success and was dedicated to enable this success through world class
technology.
 The brand promise was conveyed through new tagline that would evolve through three
distinct stages.
 SAP’s brand architecture was redesigned to give the brand its own identity. The new brand
architecture acted with SAP as the master brand with the product sub brands.
 SAP had an advantage because it offers customers bottom line results and this helped in
driving the global branding campaign that Homlish envisioned.
 A suite of online tools were developed to align customers at every contact point with the
brand.
  Global marketing campaign “country champions” was rolled out, which focused on change
management through “doing, not telling”.
 Homlish helped every employee understand the shared goals of the brand so that they don’t
use sophisticated words which was unfamiliar with the external audience about the products.
This was done through distribution of pocket sized brand cards.
 Fine-tuned usability and design of its products to demonstrate SAP’s customer focus.

Q3. List five initiatives in the order of importance that transformed SAP from a product
driven organization to a customer driven organization.

Ans 3. The top 5 initiatives that pivoted SAP from a product driven organization to a customer
driven organization were:
a. Clearly defining SAP’s value proposition: One of the main problems plaguing SAP
was that their branding and message was not coherent globally. That created confusion in
customer’s minds about the value proposition of the company.
Creating a new logo, an evolutionary approach to a three-stage evolutionary tagline,
having a consistent website, etc., all contributed to ensuring that disparate messaging was
avoided.
b. Alignment across the organization: With the first initiative they had achieved a
consistent communication to their customers. But that was external. There needed to be
internal alignment which is difficult in an organization of this size. To do this, SAP’s
Global Marketing team develop tools which brought global and regional marketing into
alignment. Adoption was encouraged by incentivization instead of mandating the
changes. This was because while the latter might be quicker, the former is more effective
in the long term.
c. Establishing a branding culture: Employees were brought into this re-branding, to help
them also understand and inculcate the new direction of SAP. This was useful as the
employees would interact with external audiences and needed to be cognizant of the
shared goals and how to explain them.
d. Branding the customer experience: A key aspect that SAP looked at was how
customers interacted with their products. They worked on the design and usability of their
products to showcase their commitment to the promise made to customers. The new
product development was driven by market insights from their customer, their
competitors, and the marketing forecasts.
e. Changing business objectives: SAP was growing rapidly and hence needed new
customer segments to expand to. They identify that SMB (small, medium businesses) was
a huge market. However, SMB’s viewed SAP’s offering as costly, complicated and
difficult to install. So, to cater to them, SAP focused on raising awareness about their
SME offering. They used marketing campaigns similar to the global campaigns that they
had done to showcase how the biggest businesses (Nike, BMW) run on SAP, except, this
time they focused on their SME customers like Mont Blanc, North Face and Oakley.
They also stressed on their extensive experience with diverse businesses.