Most importantly, the site ensures that all local marketing carried out by Centres meets Toyota’s stringent brand requirements.  Toyota found that simply putting artwork on the website was not enough.  McHugh says: "Artwork would be downloaded, and amended by local advertising agencies who didn’t fully understand the brand – thus the brand was potentially being misrepresented by 200 channel partners’ advertising agencies."

To change this, Connecti developed brandFAST.  Powered by Adobe enterprise server technology, this allows Toyota Centres to produce localised and personalised advertising campaigns, brochures and stationery, which is consistent with the corporate branding. Previously this process could take up to three days; with brandFAST, it can take as little as ten minutes. Brand-compliant artwork templates were provided, enabling local channel partners to adapt predetermined areas of the marketing message, while an automated approval and delivery process, ensures brand compliant local marketing is seamlessly dispatched to its end location in a print or publish ready file.

The portal has led to huge cost savings. Advertising can be generated faster and without the cost of local advertising agencies. The portal transacts over 10,000 marketing collateral items per year from the channel network.  Their use of the system is increasing.

McHugh denies that the system is about enforcement. He points out that, in the last year, local dealer marketing initiatives are up by 300pc, while the number of Toyota Centres experiencing margin holdback has halved.

Ladder to PRM Nirvana

Level 1: Flying blind Supplier decides what to spend based on last year’s budget plus 5% and on which partners shout loudest for funds.  There is no clear marketing strategy. These companies are often still wed to direct sales and are just experimenting with channels.

Leads are first rifled by internal sales staff, who take the cherries before passing them on to channel managers for allocation.  This is seen as important but not urgent, and so happens every month, by which time most of the leads are dead.  There is no clear idea which partners should get which leads, as the supplier typically has no  profile of its partners. Leads are sent either to distributors to reallocate or despatched by postcode. There is no follow-up and no attempt to measure whether leads turn into sales.  Partners have learnt that the leads are usually worthless and don’t follow them up. 

The PRM system is a brochure-ware datasheet website.