Manhattan Associates
Establish Thought Leadership in Emerging Technology and Vertical Markets

The Challenge:

Manhattan Associates, Inc. is a leading global provider of supply chain execution (SCE) technology solutions that help businesses manage all the aspects of data and product flow from point-of-source to point-of-consumption within a warehouse or distribution center (DC) and across a trading partner network. Manhattan Associates’ solutions provide global, real-time visibility into supply chain orders, shipments and inventory and enable businesses to readily analyze and execute on information for optimal efficiency. Manhattan Associates’ customer base spans several industries including: consumer goods, food/grocery, government, healthcare, high tech/electronics, industrial/wholesale, retail and third-party logistics.

The company had achieved 12 years of growth and profitability even during a downturn in the economy. It had always maintained a relatively low profile in terms of publicity in a relatively quiet business market. However, when larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors and supply chain management (SCM) vendors started offering some supply chain execution capabilities within their product suites, the category of SCE began to blur, creating new competition, consolidation and confusion in the market. At the same time, smaller SCE vendors started attacking vertical markets with customized pinpoint solutions.

With these market shifts, Manhattan Associates realized that it needed to raise its corporate and executive profile, distinguish itself from the competition and better promote its authority on supply chain execution issues, trends and solutions. The company wanted to highlight its best-of-breed technology and the breadth and depth of its solutions to combat the ERP competition. Additionally, since the company was strong in some vertical markets but was not as well known in others, another key objective was to increase awareness in high-growth vertical markets to thwart the smaller SCE vendors from dominating market share in certain segments of SCE. Most importantly though, Manhattan Associates wanted to be seen as a thought leader on important SCE issues and technology trends such as radio frequency identification (RFID) to bolster its corporate awareness and authority.

The LP&P Difference:

In conjunction with its ongoing PR program, Lois Paul & Partners (LP&P) embarked on a thought leadership campaign for Manhattan Associates in order to better establish market leadership and connect the company with key SCE industry and vertical market issues. The overarching theme of the thought leadership campaign for Manhattan Associates was to change the perception of supply chain execution from being an un-important “tactical afterthought” to a critical “strategic asset” in achieving business success and bottom-line results.

Initially, the program focused on promoting the idea of “operational excellence” in the supply chain to enhance the overall efficiency and productivity of a company’s distribution center. In particular, Manhattan wanted to gain greater awareness in the food/grocery and retail related verticals. In tandem, as RFID technology started to emerge as a promising and important standard, LP&P worked with Manhattan Associates to establish an early thought leadership position on the topic. Later, the transportation logistics market became increasingly important and LP&P worked to secure bylines in that area as well.

Based on current industry news, customer issues and brainstorming strategy sessions, LP&P worked with Manhattan Associates to generate article ideas and prioritize them. Once the thought leadership plan was created, LP&P worked with executive topic experts to create bylined article abstracts and pitched them to key vertical publications, IT trades and business-related media to secure interest. Once approval was secured, LP&P would draft the articles, working with Manhattan Associates’ executives to refine and finalize them. LP&P would then work with its media contacts to track and ensure placement of the bylined articles for the client.

The Results:

In a little over a year, LP&P was able to help write and place 16 bylined articles for Manhattan Associates. The thought leadership program helped Manhattan Associates make inroads in important vertical markets lacking technology sophistication such as food/grocery and retail. For the food/grocery market, LP&P helped draft and secure articles on “Achieving Operational Excellence” in Food Logistics Magazine and “Tapping into Business Intelligence for Operational Excellence” in Retail Info Systems Magazine. The articles underscored one of the main objectives of the thought leadership program, outlining how technology can help businesses improve supply chain processes and achieve substantial productivity, efficiency and cost-savings gains.

In particular, the thought leadership program helped to establish Manhattan Associates as a leader on RFID, an emerging but controversial technology. More than half of the bylined articles that LP&P helped write and place for the thought leadership program were on RFID, bringing the count to ten RFID bylined articles to date. The first few articles “Getting Smart on Smart Tags” and “The Brave New World of RFID” were informative, educational articles that touted the benefits of the technology and urged readers to investigate the technology. The magazine sales representative told Manhattan Associates that the articles were very popular with the readers and many calls came in to the magazine about the articles.

Then, LP&P helped Manhattan Associates take a more aggressive stand on the technology by developing “call to action” bylined articles such as “Now’s the Time for RFID” in Line56 Magazine and “Take a Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to RFID” to facilitate adoption and outline steps to begin implementation. After that, LP&P worked with Manhattan Associates to connect our RFID bylined articles to the industry news of Wal-Mart, one of the largest retailers, mandating that suppliers become RFID-compliant by January 2005. LP&P worked with Manhattan Associates to develop viewpoint or opinion articles such as “The Watershed Moment for RFID” for c/Net that explained the implications of Wal-Mart’s mandates and the changing market situation that resulted.

LP&P also helped Manhattan Associates use RFID to connect to an important and timely issue in the food industry. With an article entitled, “Is RFID the Answer?” in Progressive Grocer Magazine, Manhattan Associates identifies how RFID technology might help suppliers address more stringent accountability requirements in light of the controversial topic of voluntary country-of-origin labeling (COOL) guidelines issued in Spring 2003. These COOL guidelines would become mandatory in 2004 for the fresh food industry.

Another benefit of the thought leadership program was that it helped Manhattan Associates become better known and begin to build relationships with business press contacts outside of their targeted market. The bylined article that LP&P placed in c/net garnered Manhattan Associates an unsolicited call from Newsweek reporter, Brad Stone. Stone saw the article on c/net and was interested in speaking with Manhattan Associates for an RFID article he was writing for Newsweek’s, Sept. 29th issue. A Manhattan Associates’ senior executive spoke with Stone for more than 30 minutes and is now a qualified RFID contact resource.

Now, Manhattan Associates is recognized as a thought leader on RFID and is mentioned or called for comment by reporters writing about RFID. When Wal-Mart made their latest announcement on RFID, in November 2003, Manhattan Associates was the only vendor that was quoted in an InformationWeek story, “Wal-Mart RFID Rollout to Start in Texas” that covered the news.

Additionally, all of the bylined articles were posted to the Web site and many of the articles were re-purposed and placed in non-competing publications in the United States and Europe and used for other internal marketing and sales purposes. Many of the articles drove traffic to Manhattan Associates’ Web site and potential customers to authors by providing Internet and email addresses at the end of the article for readers.

Bylined Articles

• STORES Magazine , “Getting Smart on Smart Tags,” June 2002
• STORES Magazine , “The Brave New World of RFID,” Oct. 2002
• Food Logistics Magazine , “Technology Trends Section: Achieving Operational Excellence,” Oct. 2002
• Retail Info Systems (RIS) News, “The President’s Club: Tapping into Business Intelligence for Operational Excellence,” Dec. 2002
• Integrated Solutions for Retailers Magazine , “Getting Smart on Smart Tags,” March 2003
• Line56 Magazine , “Viewpoint Column: Now’s the Time for RFID,” April 2003
• Supply Chain Systems Magazine , “Dynamic Routing: What it Means for Today’s Retail Suppliers,” May 2003
• Progressive Grocer Magazine , “Is RFID the Answer?,” May 2003
• STORES Magazine , “Take a Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to RFID,” July 2003
• STORES Magazine , “The Wal-Mart Watershed Moment for RFID,” Aug. 2003
• CNET , “Perspectives Column: The Wal-Mart Watershed Moment,” Sept. 2003
• STORES Magazine , “Get on Board, Wal-Mart Drives the RFID Train,” Oct. 2003
• APICS Magazine , “The Next Great Moneysaver: High-tech and Electronics Manufacturers are Turning to an Underutilized Area of Cost reduction,” Nov./Dec. 2003
• STORES Magazine, “Using Reverse Logistics to Boost Asset Recovery,” Dec. 2003
• Business Integration Journal , “RFID Warrants a Strategic Approach,” Feb. 2004
• Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies , “Outsourcing Needs Truly Transportation-Aware Collaborative Network,” March/April 2004
• Transportation Technology Today , “ Integrating Warehouse Management Systems and Transportation Management Systems to Streamline Business Processes,” April 2004
• Business Integration Journal , “Using Web Services to Integrate Disparate Systems in Supply Chain Execution,” May 2004
• Food Logistics Magazine , Looking Beyond Warehouse Walls for Productivity Gains,” May 2004
• Traffic World , “Integrating Transportation Processes to Improve Supply Chain Execution,” May 2004