P&G teamed up with a tiny Internet marketing specialist, Worldwide Magnifi, to create Project EMM, which in April 2001 became the company Emmperative. The idea was to make enterprise marketing management software based on P&G’s own internal processes, and then to market these tools to the rest of the world.

P&G’s marketing processes are one of the secrets of its success. They are strictly adhered to throughout the company, across all of its brands, though they are in a state of constant refinement as information from successful and less successful projects is fed back into the system in order to learn the lessons and apply them to the next campaign.

By producing a piece of software that mimicked those systems, Emmperative reckoned it could attract other companies eager to emulate P&G’s success. But there was more to it than that. Emmperative calculated that as much as 65 percent of a marketing manager’s time is taken up with administrative tasks. If those tasks could be automated in software, the idea ran, think how much time could be freed up for creative thought – which, after all, is what marketing managers really should be drawing their wages for. The company believed that with the proper application of technology, the administrative burden could be reduced to 20 percent of the working day.

Emmperative’s product range consisted of a set of customizable software tools that let clients build systems which would automate marketing processes, from setting up consumer research projects, tracking brand assets, getting project sign-off from all interested parties, purchasing, invoicing and feeding back information on the success or otherwise of each project. These tools would replace the ad hoc mixture of spreadsheets, calendars, flowcharts and random emails that normally make up a marketing manager’s technological toolbox. They would create a single coherent system that everyone in the marketing department could use for every marketing task.

“Marketing know-how can be codified – it is a process, and companies go through the same steps to turn a concept into a product or brand. It’s just seldom looked on in that way,” explained Hunter Hastings, former chief executive of Emmperative.

With investment from a variety of venture capitalists, and management consultancy Accenture, as well as P&G, Emmperative’s future looked assured. The company, based in California, had about 90 employees at its height and gained some big clients: Coca-Cola, Philips, Standard Chartered Bank.

However, about a year after if was founded, the company folded. P&G swallowed the loss of its estimated US$ 20m investment, and gave up on the idea of selling its internal processes to other companies.

What went wrong? One of the key problems may have been the company’s business model. Emmperative wanted to act as an application service provider, offering its software for use to businesses over the Internet instead of selling it to them in packages to be used internally by the client. Customers effectively rent the software instead of owning it and installing it in their own systems. But this model is difficult to work in practice, requiring an expensive telecom infrastructure, and can be vulnerable to failure.

The demise of Emmperative is a blow to the fledgling enterprise marketing management industry, but not a fatal one. The company’s failure does not prove that the software cannot work, but may instead indicate that the company’s set-up was flawed. P&G seems to have been nervous of stepping so far outside its competences in this way, by branching out into software creation. A P&G spokesman said last week: “We did not think the particular business model was sustainable over time, but we believe another organization could more effectively bring this project to market while we focus on our core business, which is our consumer brands.”

The software assets of Emmperative could be sold to another bidder, if one emerges. Meanwhile, there is opportunity for others to learn from the pioneering work at P&G and capitalize on a good idea.

Fiona Harvey writes for the Financial Times global business newspaper.