Cultivating current customers is just one strategy used by this already highly successful marketing firm, says Jamie Peck, managing director.

Many companies would love to have the success of MRM Gillespie, a marketing services firm in Princeton, NJ. Revenues have grown consistently at 10% each year, and some of its products—such as advertisements for the drug Plavix—routinely reach millions during the evening network news.

But MRM Gillespie isn’t content to coast. The firm, a subsidiary of Interpublic Group’s McCann World Group, aims to grow revenues by 15% in 2007. That means accumulating marketshare in a fiercely competitive industry. It also means attracting and retaining skilled talent, the industry’s key resource, despite being located outside urban hubs where many top-shelf marketing professionals live and work.

To accomplish its goals, MRM Gillespie plans to bring time-tested strategies to bear once again on this most faddish of industries. At the core lies a plan to build on its niche strengths, do more business with current clients, and be creative in the tools it uses to recruit employees.

“The unique selling proposition, as we bring our clients into the digital space, is that you shouldn’t be fragmenting your media delivery,” said Jamie Peck, managing director. “It should all be in one place so that you have consistency of thinking.”

Engaging customers
Offering more services to a marketing client may sound challenging, but it’s not when the firm has great depth to offer. Beyond classic advertising, MRM Gillespie uses emerging media technologies to cultivate an “engaged” customer through direct and digital marketing.

The result, Peck said, is often a customer who feels connected to a particular brand or product line. “It’s less about building that 30-second TV spot that starts to build a brand and more about building a platform,” Peck said. “That’s where a consumer or a patient can engage a brand and a product and then start to build a relationship with that.”

Within this rubric, MRM Gillespie sells its clients on the advantages of doing all their marketing (not just their advertising or direct mail, for instance) through one organization. One advantage to such integration, Peck said, is the ability to convey a coherent and well-developed message across the spectrum of marketing, from a corporate Web site to highway billboards. Clients also benefit from MRM Gillespie’s ability to analyze exactly how a customer has responded to a particular facet of one campaign or another.

“The biggest differentiator between what we do and what a traditional advertising agency does is that everything we do is measurable,” Peck said. “When you go to a Web site, we know exactly what you’ve done and if you purchased something. If you just saw a commercial for Tide, we don’t know if you went out and bought Tide.”

Despite well-tested techniques, marketing firms must demonstrate an ability to adapt. Here again, MRM Gillespie plans to draw on its strength as a broad service organization. In the late 1990s, for instance, MRM Gillespie got in early to the race to market pharmaceuticals directly to consumers. In recent years, however, federal regulators, in response to prodding from Congress, have frowned on that approach. No problem, according to Peck. In an environment where educational marketing is now encouraged to help consumers better understand health and disease, MRM Gillespie can easily draw on its experience of helping customers find their way to the information they want.

Maximizing each medium
Even with all these advantages, MRM Gillespie is only as strong as its 160-person team. As technologies change rapidly, the company has to be sure it’s staffed with personnel capable of maximizing what each medium has to offer. But getting the best on board isn’t always easy when you don’t have a Manhattan address.

“We certainly have some recruiting challenges to find the right mix,” Peck said. “It’s a lot easier to recruit and find the people in New York or in Philadelphia than in a New Jersey suburb.”

To overcome this hurdle, MRM Gillespie emphasizes its blue-chip clients and unique offerings to prospective employees. Peck added that talented people are willing to commute to Princeton even from the cities if they recognize the company as the brains behind exciting campaigns.

Of course, it’s not all about large companies and national campaigns. MRM Gillespie also has a culture of giving back. For example, the firm handles marketing for Home Front, a well-known and well-respected New Jersey provider of services and shelter for homeless people. The Home Front campaign isn’t a second-tier project at the firm, but instead draws highly motivated and skilled staff who get the resources they need to do premium work.

Staffers on such a project not only get personal satisfaction from the cause but also have a chance to submit their work for high-profile awards. When they win, then MRM Gillespie gets noticed in the industry—and stands a chance to land a few more ringers in the next recruiting drive.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald is a correspondent for Christian Science Monitor. Based in Newburyport, Mass., he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .