Marketing Planning Tool: Carbon Five

Charles Schwab & Co., 2005

Challenge

Centralize data throughout Charles Schwab & Co.

Charles Schwab & Co., a Fortune 500 financial services firm, needed to centrally manage and report on all marketing data across the enterprise. Schwab's mandate: Share information throughout the organization and up to senior management.

Solution

An easy-to-use application for the marketing and executive staff

Carbon Five worked with Schwab's internal creative services team to design and develop an intuitive application that allows the marketing team to enter and update project data. Much emphasis was placed on developing a rich user interface to make the tool easy to use and to facilitate its adoption. We created a flexible, web-based application — the Marketing Planning Tool, or MPT — to support various marketing teams with different needs. Besides being highly intuitive, it has multiple built-in user levels, to restrict access by role; and all data access is secure.

The MPT is a repository for a great deal of marketing data, but we're well-aware that data alone isn't worth much unless people can glean meaning from it. To this end, the application integrates data from other Schwab systems to make MPT reports more valuable. And the reporting engine is flexible, allowing users to customize the output of a dozen out-of-the-box reports or helping them to extract a fully customized set of data.

Tool also has a powerful budgeting module, which is used exclusively by Schwab's executive team for annual planning.

Value

Schwab now has the means to make more informed decisions

The Carbon Five-designed Marketing Planning Tool provides clear insight into the effectiveness of various marketing efforts and allows Schwab to budget for the upcoming year based on past performance.