Suites – what suites?

I have been swamped with work this week. In fact, so swamped that I forgot to watch episode two of “Suitemates“, the big new marketing campaign by Kinaxis, a Canada-based business that delivers Rapid Response, a supply chain management tool. Suitemates is a six-episode short video series that tells the fictional story of a merger between two ERP companies and how the two CEOs ended up in jail for fraud and unethical business conduct, after luring their customers into buying more and more of a software that never delivers what it promises.

Suites are sour

In today’s episode of Suitemates we are still following the executives as they are meeting with their lawyers, and today they take us back to their company presentation after their merger, announcing the new names of their software suites, where absolutely none of the names or ludicrous acronyms they come up with make much sense at all. What about “Supply Chain Auto Alert Management”, or short, “SCAAM”? But I guess that is sort of true about a lot of software, to sell old wine in new bottles you need a catchy name…do watch and judge (and laugh) for yourself.



And before I forget, remember the elephants, because to make the whole thing a bit more interesting, there are several elephants subtly placed throughout the scenes of the six videos. If you find them all, you can win an iPad!

Good marketing?

In Suitemates, Kinaxis poke fun at what they call Big ERP and how supply chain consulting companies supposedly work and how they couldn’t care less about their customers’ true needs as long as they make big bucks. Let’s hope that is not true for Kinaxis. That said, Suitemates is less of a marketing effort for Kinaxis itself, but for their Supply Chain Expert Community

In a way, the Supply Chain Expert Community is an extension of the 21st Century Supply Chain, the already well established Kinaxis blog, but the Supply Chain Expert Community is so much more, because Kinaxis has done a great job inembracing social media and establishing a forum for anything supply supply chain, with expert bloggers, discussion boards and entertaining videos.

Links

Related

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags: ,

ARTICLES and PAPERS
How to secure your supply chain - 4/7
My previous post was part three of a series based on the Swedish business continuity handbook titled[...]
Risky ramblings
Why such a title for today's post? The abstract of the 2004 article Risky business: Expanding the di[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management
Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with th[...]
Book Review: Political Risk
Egypt is in crisis. After Tunisia, now Egypt is rocked by a popular uprising, and the outcome of the[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Zycus and the Supply Risk Explosion
"Ten or fifteen years ago, you could not convince most procurement and supply-chain professionals to[...]
Vulnerable or valuable supply chain?
More than a year old now, but still holding not so few words of wisdom is the Pricewaterhouse Cooper[...]