Summary
SunGard’s ‘TEN’ campaign focuses around three pillars that SunGard see supporting the ongoing development of worldwide financial services: transparency, efficiency and networks (TEN). These areas were chosen to provide a common voice to the many different aspects of the financial industry that the business addresses and to resonate with SunGard customers globally.
The campaign has been centred around a website which acted as a hub for all activity, most notably the series of fifteen events which were held around the world. The content on this website ranges from traditional materials through to social media where the business has pioneered the use of this tool in financial services.
SunGard hosted city day events in locations from Sao Paulo to Abu Dhabi and Johannesburg to Mumbai. Via these events, the ‘TEN’ campaign was translated for every region, ensuring that SunGard was presented as a locally relevant business but with the scale and reach of a global leader.
Over the year the campaign allowed the company both to present innovative ideas in its established markets and to raise its profile in key new countries. We engaged with staff, customers and prospects in creative ways that have impacted positively on the business.
About SunGard
SunGard Financial Systems provides mission-critical software and IT services to institutions in virtually every segment of the financial services industry. The primary purpose of most of these systems is to automate the many specialised business processes associated with trading, managing investment portfolios and accounting for investment assets.
They address the processing requirements of a broad range of users within financial services, including asset managers, traders, custodians, compliance officers, treasurers, insurers, risk managers, hedge fund managers, plan administrators and clearing agents.
SunGard also provides consulting services that focus on implementation and integration of these solutions and on software development. $20 trillion in investment assets are accounted for and managed daily on SunGard systems. More than 10 million trades are processed by broker-dealers and other financial intermediaries on SunGard systems.
SunGard Financial Systems is part of SunGard Data Systems, one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies, serving more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. It was formed in 1982 as a leveraged buy-out from the Sun Oil Company and is now the world’s largest privately held business software and IT services company.
Strategy — broader business issues the company is facing
• Post financial crisis — SunGard has been listening and talking to many industry experts and believes that the key drivers to financial services returning to a more stable and flourishing position are transparency, efficiency and networks. In order to communicate this on a global basis these drivers have become the three pillars of the marketing campaign. The entire financial industry has been affected by the financial crisis, but it also highlighted the need for the sophisticated tools and services that SunGard provides. It needed to find a way to communicate the benefits of our solution suite in a way that would resonate with customers in a time of pressurised budgets and regulatory scrutiny.
• Brand and business perception — SunGard is comprised of many businesses that it has acquired over the years. Much has been done internally to organise the company into business units that focus on providing software and technology services to the different parts of the financial industry. As a consequence of this, many customers and prospects are familiar only with the part of SunGard that they work with. It is therefore of increasing importance to us that our targeted audience understands the breadth and depth of the business in order to provide reassurance that customers and prospects are committing themselves to a major player in the marketplace.
• Lead generation — as with any business, the ability to generate new sales leads is key. The company needed to do this not only in established markets but also in areas where SunGard had little or no previous profile.
• Education — one of SunGard’s corporate objectives is to grow our business in developing and less mature markets. This necessitates educating a new audience in how SunGard can benefit their business, as well as producing content for the campaign website that would appeal to an international audience.
Objectives of the campaign
The general goals of the campaign were to create an online magazine that would appeal to a global audience to:
• Increase global awareness of SunGard’s mission critical solutions.
• Continue to establish SunGard as an industry thought-leader.
• Drive customer engagement through different channels (city days, social networks, web, print collaterals).
• Generate leads and increase revenue.
• Build a community through social networks.
• Create staff engagement.
Target audience
The campaign was designed to appeal to a global audience of customers, prospects, analysts, partners, media, regulators, opinion formers, bloggers, employees and prospective employees in the financial industry. Each category had different, subtle needs and interests that needed to be addressed in order for the campaign to be successful. These differences are amplified when dealt with on a global scale.
Media, channels or techniques used
Many avenues of communication were used to engage our audience in the conversation on ‘TEN’ and maximise our global reach. People were driven to the ‘TEN’ site through social media, PR, newsletters, event communications and the events themselves.
SunGard partnered with other industry thought-leaders to help disseminate our message and drive people to our online magazine and to our global events. We monitored the statistics of people visiting the site and we saw numbers increase from under 5000 unique visits from April 2010 to over 20,000 unique visits in April 2011.
Campaign identity
• Icons for transparency, efficiency and networks that were recognised globally applied to all material.
•The use of location imagery on collateral — produced in two levels — one to represent that ‘globalness’ of the campaign and a second level that was used on a local/regional level.
Online:
• Campaign website — an online magazine optimised to the most predominant browser size and degraded gracefully for users who did not have flash.
Electronic communications:
• E-newsletters that were sent out on a quarterly basis.
• Event communications — save the dates, invitations, reminders — translated where necessary e.g. French, Mandarin, Portuguese, German.
Offline:
• Solutions guide — introducing the concept of ‘TEN’ and showcasing our suite of solutions. These were handed out at the city days.
• Hard copy event communications — invitations posted to attendees — in some countries, e.g. Germany and Switzerland it is customary to give people printed invitations.
• On-site guides — translated where necessary, e.g. French, Mandarin, Portuguese, German.
Events:
• 15 city days hosted in five continents from April to December.
• A ‘live show’ event presentation given in local languages by SunGard representatives.
• All events were conducted in the local language, as were all communications to promote each event.
• Exhibitions — SunGard held two exhibitions, one in Hong Kong and the other in London, where the international sell-side financial community came together to meet and network with the buy-side community.
Strategic partners:
• SunGard partnered with organisations around the world to promote and endorse our message and our events — they included Financial News (London), Latin Finance (Sao Paulo), and MENA FM (Abu Dhabi).
• PR and AR — analyst events and briefings — designed to engage, involve and win the support of
this key opinion-forming audience.
• Simultaneous campaign launch in the US and EMEA through media and analyst drinks events.
• ‘TEN Trends’ — a series of thought leadership pieces highlighting ten trends towards the ‘TEN’ theme for every area of our business.
• Press releases — all releases, from customer wins to new product launches to survey material, angled towards the ‘TEN’ theme.
• Content contributors — positioned senior spokespeople from across the business as commentators on the ‘TEN’ theme by producing a range of content from blogs to podcasts and videos.
Social media:
• Maintained a lively Twitter feed for the campaign and arranged ‘Twitterviews’, where journalists and analysts discussed key topics with SunGard spokespeople.
• Twitter.
• Facebook.
• LinkedIn.
• WordPress blog.
• YouTube.
Timescales of the campaign
Research and planning — July to October 2009.
Creation of on and offline collateral — October 2009 to March 2010.
Campaign launch — March 2010 – ongoing.
Results
Statistics for ‘TEN’ 2010 city days:
Net cast*: 159,814
Responses: 10,126
Response rate**: 6.3 per cent
Opportunities: 122
Conversion rate***: 1.2 per cent
Total Pipeline Value in USD****: 24,231,252
Won Value in USD: 8,859,758
Cost in USD: 2,850,792
ROI: 210.8 per cent
*Net cast is the total touches, not necessarily unique people.
**Response Rate = number of responses/net cast.
***Conversion Rate = number of opportunities/number of responses.
****Total pipeline value includes the won value below.
Client testimonial
Paul Wilson, division chief marketing officer at SunGard, said, “The B2B world has been rocked by the financial crisis. What’s needed is more transparency, more efficiency, and better business process networks for easy access to liquidity. At SunGard we call it ‘TEN’. Finance industry luminaries and tens of thousands of finance industry professionals have joined us in our campaign over the world, from Mumbai to New York, London to Sao Paulo. SunGard is delivering software and services to help make ‘TEN’ a reality for thousands of financial institutions and companies everywhere.”
