Suites – what suites?

Posted on 2010-04-10 by

Revised on: 2010-04-22

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.