Even through his strong French accent, Gael de Kerdanet’s sales pitch is pretty compelling. Given companies typically plough between 3 and 6 percent of their total turnover back into brand marketing, he argues, why do they ignore the opportunity to brand their most frequent outgoing communications: their emails? De Kerdanet is chief executive of start-up Auckland business Calcium Software, a pioneer in email and online marketing tools.

Calcium’s flagship product is mailPrimer, a solution for “priming” outbound emails with corporate branding and messaging tailored to the recipient, hence the thrust of his sales pitch.

Why, he asks, do businesses spend so much money on other forms of marketing – direct mail, brochures, website and web-marketing but ignore their huge daily volume of email?

“It really doesn’t make sense when you know that half of the interaction between a company and it’s stakeholders – whether it’s customers, prospects, partners – is email-based – so half of the daily interaction is not branded,” he says.

“The question I ask them is: Does brand matter? If it does, then why don’t they brand their emails? If it doesn’t then why do they spend all that money on brand marketing to start with? It’s a pretty powerful argument.”

And it seems to be an argument de Kerdanet is winning, if Calcium’s growth rate is any indication. From ten customers in, 2003/2004, its first year in business, Calcium now has close to 300, and he expects that number to double in 2008.

The business is now at a break-even level and about to embark on an expansion into Australia and then the UK.

“We’re starting to get some good size customers – 200 to 300- user businesses,” de Kerdanet says. “We’re getting really good traction with well-known companies.”

Those customers include sharebroker Direct Broking, economic development agency Positively Wellington, Cogent and intellectual property law firm AJ Park.

About 300,000 Calcium-primed emails now get sent out to New Zealanders each week.

“Everybody talks about closing the chasm and all that and that’s really where we feel we’re at now,” de Kerdanet says.

The French national first spent time in New Zealand in 1989 and 1990. He loved the experience so when the opportunity to move back to head up Calcium arrived in 2003, he took it.

His background is in strategic marketing and his previous business experience includes key management roles at two subsidiaries of Canon.

One was Criterion Software, now an Electronic Art company, where de Kerdanet was responsible for re-launching RenderWare, now the world’s leading real-time 3D middleware solution for the games industry.

The other was mantra4D, a real-time 3D digital factory management solution licensed by DaimlerChrysler. He also worked for Canon Research Europe where he launched UCanTalk, a command and control speech recognition technology subsequently licensed by IBM.

Prior to those roles he held management positions in the UK within the youth tourism industry and in France in the event management market. De Kerdanet holds an MBA from London’s Cass Business School and a BA in business law from the University of Paris Il Assas.

He says his recreational passions are sailing, fishing and reading. While Calcium may be closing the chasm, there is little time for too much relaxing on the end of a fishing line, however.

A by-product of the growing success of the one-to-one mailPrimer tool has been customer interest in a “one-to-many” solution for sending out corporate newsletters and other mass emails.

While there are numerous solutions in the “one-to-many” space, Calcium’s mailPrimer 1-2-many product has an edge because it's utilising successful sending strategies the company has developed through the traditional 1-2-1 product, de Kerdanet says.

“Using the 1-2-1 technology we’ve built a front end to access a database, allowing customers to manage a list, and it can be synchronised with CRM packages. We’ve also built a template manager around this, so a customer doesn’t need to spend long designing a template.”

But Calcium is about more than email-sending products, he says. “The name of the game for us is not really one-to-one email marketing or one-to-many email marketing. The name of the game is really putting together technology that allows our customers to actually manage their communications with their prospects. It’s just a step before CRM so we work with CRM packages, we don’t work against them. We pass information back and forwards between the CRM and ourselves.”

Calcium is currently developing a platform which allows customers to manage the communication process with their prospects all the way through the “sales pipeline” by modifying emails using multiple mailPrimer templates depending on the state of the relationship with the prospect.

“So you can really reinforce different messages depending on which stage in the pipe these people are or you can segment your market vertically – you can say for lawyers I want this message, for doctors I want that message.” Meanwhile Calcium’s Imprint/Silhouette platform provides seamless integration between a company’s CRM, email and internet site, allowing tracking and analysis of the site surfing behaviour of prospects who visit a website.

“From there it’s very easy for us to do a couple of smart things like re-categorise the prospect based on what they looked at [on the site]. Next time you communicate with them – whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many – you can apply specific templates and content to the email. In other words tailoring the communications based on what you know about the prospect.”

Because of the nature of its products, Calcium is beginning to benefit from the “viral” marketing effect of having several hundred thousand emails a week dispatched by various companies with a “Powered by mailPrimer” message attached.

“We don’t need to prospect any more. We don’t need to cold-call. We’re getting more and more inquiries from the web and also from people calling us. The whole thing is now starting to ramp up very nicely, which is good,” says de Kerdanet.

On another marketing front, Calcium uses salesforce.com as its CRM system. De Kerdanet says salesforce was simple to deploy, has proven easy to customise to the business’s requirements, while the on-demand payment model suits the cashflow constraints of a start-up.

He is still working on achieving the ideal scenario of linking it to the company’s MYOB accounting software, however.

Until last year de Kerdanet had a second role, as CEO of Sparkbox, the angel investment business that has been a major backer of Calcium. In the Sparkbox role, de Kerdanet believes he was able to learn a lot about the requirements of New Zealand start-up businesses.

One of the lessons he has picked up is that while, in the IT space in particular, marketing is often shunned by start-up companies, it is something they need to have a strategy around in order to succeed.

“A lot of people make the mistake of mixing up marketing as in branding and marketing as in strategy,” he says.

“It’s really crucial for companies to think about what they’re building in the context of customers, competition, profitability and the long term. You really want to be building a company whose products are going to be owning the market, so the two or three ides that people have about a company should be the driver of that market.”

The other two key factors to start-up success outside marketing are ensuring your funding structure works and that you have the right people onboard, de Kerdanet says.

“What I really like about New Zealand is the kiwi inventiveness and I really think New Zealand has what it takes to become the R&D centre of the world. I don’t think New Zealanders realise yet why it could become the centre of the world,” he says.

“I think a lot of the communication that is done by New Zealand in terms of the ICT sector is not as clear as it could be. And there is one thing that New Zealand has that no one else has in the world – it’s being safe.”

He says while countries and regions as diverse as California, Ireland, Israel, France, India, and the UK may all promote themselves as strong research and development magnets, New Zealand could do the same, but with the added hook of being a safe location for entrepreneurs and technology workers to settle and do business.

“All these places are great places but they’re not safe. If New Zealand was to push the message that it’s a safe place to develop a new business, centred around development capital that would push more people to come to New Zealand, and more people to immigrate with money to start businesses,” he says.

“It could be a bit like California in the 1980s. That’s something New Zealand should start to think about a lot more at the macro level.”

Meanwhile Calcium, he says, is ready to begin a sales push out into the Australian market followed, probably next year, by a move into the UK. While impressive, the company’s growth hasn’t been as fast as he would have liked.

“Probably the reason we didn’t grow as fast as we could have was it took time finding the right people. There has been a lot of re-shuffling over the past three years at Calcium but now I’ve got a team of seven people plus myself and it’s really a team,” he says.

“It’s everybody working together and working really hard, very customer focused, making miracles every day. I don’t need to manage people, we just agree on goals, people go there and just deliver. That’s really awesome.”

June 2007