06 April 2011
After years at an established multinational, Maxim Weitzman took on the challenge to create a marketing strategy for a fast-growing startup, and questions abounded:
Where to begin?
How to build a brand name?
How to juggle internal communications and external?
How to sequence it all?
Weitzman switched jobs just three months ago, leaving the post of vice president of marketing at Telefonica USA, the Americas unit of Spain’s telecommunications giant, to head up marketing and communications for Spain-based startup Celistics and its subsidiary Movilway, both run from South Florida.
Celistics distributes cell phones in Spain and Latin America, mostly for Telefonica, and now is expanding to serve other clients. Its Movilway division lets consumers, even those without banking accounts, pre-pay into cellphone-based accounts to pay other bills from electricity to government fees. Started in 2008, Celistics posted $1.4 billion in revenues last year and expects solid growth again this year.
But the company lacked a clear marketing strategy, said the 40-year-old Venezuelan executive.
Business took off easily with a ready client in Telefonica, which sought a logistics partner in Latin America. But Celistics needed to develop a strong brand image to lure additional clients, while facing tough competition from older rivals such as Miami’s cell-phone logistics giant Brightstar Corp.
At a company retreat in the Dominican Republic, Weitzman told Celistics’ executive team: “We’ve been growing really fast. We need to take Vitamin M for Marketing.” He said “Vitamin M” could help enhance all the company’s senses, so it could look good, touch the market and smell opportunities, for example.
To help develop a brand image, he turned to employees and asked for suggestions for slogans. He figured the request would help employees feel part of building the brand. He also offered an iPad as a prize for the winning slogans for Celistics and Movilway. He received more than 300 entries.
Next, he focused on digital and social marketing. He worked to re-do the Web site, using search engine optimization to come out high on Google searches. He put the company on social media such as Twitter and Facebook, letting interested younger employees get involved. He revved up the internal intranet as a company tool not just for announcements but also to schedule meetings, conduct evaluations and other basics. And he created a digital catalogue of products, so sales staff could easily update offerings and directly sell on their computers and other mobile devices.
To create a sense of community among managers in different countries, he also went high-tech. Executives scattered across borders already meet by videoconference at regular intervals. He decided the most senior executives would surprise the group by showing up somewhere for the meetings.
Some participants honed in on the company’s strategy to market mobile-phone payments, a system now popular in Kenya and developing elsewhere that lets people without bank accounts or credit cards pay bills through their cellphones without using cash and often from afar.
Which Latin American countries now have Celistics’ Movilway service?, asked Leonel Azuela, managing director of interactive marketing company Quaxar.
How much does it cost the merchant?, asked Miguel Molina, Quaxar’s director of business development.
And how are the payments tracked?, asked Ronald Wieselberg, vice president of SafetyPay, an e-payments company that lets Latin American customers without U.S. credit cards pay for international purchases from bank accounts.
Weitzman said Movilway is starting pilot projects in Chile and Mexico. Customers pre-pay into an account on their cellphone, much as they would buy pre-paid minutes for their phones. Then, they draw down that account to pay bills, with text messages used to communicate payments. A merchant pays a fee for the service lower than the “swipe fee” on a credit card, which should attract retailers, he said.
Celistics has benchmarked marketing budgets for similar companies at 3 percent to 14 percent of sales, with some in the high range because the mobile-payments business is new. Funds come largely from cellphone makers such as Nokia and not from company resources, making budgeting simpler, Weitzman said.
To leverage those funds, Weitzman tries to be creative. At a recent mobile phone trade show in Barcelona, where other companies were better known, he decided to hire a camera crew to follow the Celistics’ team, make it look like a TV or documentary team was doing a show on them and thereby, create media buzz. Other TV camera teams and media saw the crew and asked to film Celistics too.
“It worked,’ Weitzman said, estimating his $5,000 outlay on the camera crew resulted in marketing from other TV teams and media likely worth more than $1 million. “We were pleasantly surprised.”
Marketing Connections is one of seven event series organized by WorldCity to bring together executives on international business topics. The marketing series is sponsored by interactive marketing company Quaxar and by The Marketwise Group, which focuses on marketing, public relations and digital strategy, mainly in Latin America. The next Marketing Connections event is set for May 13.