What does “GMAS” stand for?
GMAS stands for Global Marketing Advantage System, a concept in running your business that increases the probability of success and reduces the risks all businesses face in dynamic markets.

What is GMAS?
GMAS is defined as: “the knowledge, experience, systems, processes, procedures, techniques, training and software tools required to successfully generate a global marketing advantage”.

How does it create market advantage and keep you ahead of the competition?
It enhances an organisation’s understanding of its market and in particular it identifies opportunities and therefore provides you with more options. This, coupled with the ability to detect early signs of paradigm shift, allows the user to avoid or take advantage of the shift. In effect it keeps you one step ahead of the market.

What is the main concept behind GMAS?
There are several concepts behind GMAS and it is based on the work of some of the leading management thinkers of recent years. Two concepts you need to accept are: All plans, including strategic plans, contain the 3F’s of Fact, Faith and Fiction. The problem is that it is not always easy to tell the F’s apart and secondly, that strategy is only as good as the critical assumptions it has been based upon. If those critical assumptions change, strategy may have to change also, and not in the next planning cycle but there and then. To wait is to knowingly sink your organisation as many of the big names of the 90s have found. This has been made more apparent by the events of the 11th of September where whole industries’ strategic plans were compromised. While you did not need GMAS to tell you that; more subtle changes in individual markets can, and have proven to be, just as devastating to individual industry sectors.

Within which sectors can GMAS be applied?
We interviewed 150 companies in 26 countries from across the globe and GMAS senior managers found merit in the GMAS concept in almost 95% of the industry sectors that we looked at. However, there was one area we found where GMAS wasn’t applicable and that was in high volume contract manufacturing. Companies in this sector may be huge but they only have a handful of customers. Because they are so close to their customer, GMAS seems not to be relevant in that part of the industry because they only do things that will reduce the cost of the commodity and live or die based on the success or failure of their customers. That is to say they have a symbiotic relationship, but like the helpful bacteria in the stomach of a cow, they die should the cow die.

Does GMAS integrate with Balanced Scorecard?
Balanced Scorecard is a methodology that allows you to communicate the strategy throughout your company and measure how your strategy is being implemented. GMAS is a system on top of the Balanced Scorecard that ensures that your strategy is always optimised. Thus preventing you from asking the impossible from your staff as they try to achieve goals set by a flawed or outdated strategy.

Will it improve my bottom line results?
By understanding how your market performs and the opportunities that exist within a stormy market you are able to generate more options and thus manage risk better, therefore increasing your bottom line.

How long does it take for GMAS to be implemented?
It depends on the size of the organisation but generally it can be as little as three months or as long as two years depending on the complexity but on the whole, most installations are completed in around the 90 day mark.

What human resources do I need to implement GMAS?
The implementation of GMAS requires that you have the full backing of the management team otherwise GMAS will never get deployed or at the least not be able to work to its full capacity in your company. The number of staff required is directly proportional to the size of the company and its global reach. We tend to use consultancy teams of between three and ten consultants for national companies. On-going the resource varies based on the complexity of the market and its volatility and the degree to which you have automated GMAS function. The on-going function can be performed without increasing you current strategy teams numbers.

What are the IT requirements for GMAS?
In the large global companies other than a very robust computer hardware that will not fall over easily, we also assume that you will be running some kind of system such as Balanced Scorecard, Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management or be in the process of deploying this type of system. In smaller companies, as long as you can provide internal measures of success or failure, then you can deploy GMAS with a very modest IT requirement.