Posts Tagged ‘integrated marketing communications’
What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
I just received an interesting comment on my “For Hire” post that asked:
“Are there really any leading authorities – aside from published authors – on integrated marketing and communications? There are a lot of self-promoters who claim expertise in what is usually “the obvious”.
This comment, while obviously an attempt to discredit my experience, made me realized that there are probably many marketing professionals out there that have the same misunderstanding and misperception when it comes to understanding the theory and benefits of true integration.
I want to help fix that.
From the dawn of its time, which would be about 1993, when the “Fathers of Integration” Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn wrote The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, integration has always been based in customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven marketing. Unfortunately, marketers conveniently ignored the customer-centric, data-driven part of integration. We’ll get to that in a bit…
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: customer experience, Customer-Centric, don schultz, IMC, integrated marketing, integrated marketing communications, Jay Galbraith, Ranjay Gulati | 
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Saturday Morning Reads (Late Edition): Is Social CRM Bringing Companies & Customers Together Yet?
“No company will tell you, ‘I don’t want to be customer centric,’ but do you know the difference between taking an inside-out versus an outside-in approach?” - Ranjay Gulati
An organization’s goal for being social with customers is, presumably, to gain a better understand of what customers want and need. Typically used to warehouse customer data, marketing campaigns, and customer service endeavors, CRM systems now must also capture the social interactions of customers and prospects as well. It is those social interactions— in a natural setting—that will provide organizations with untarnished insights.
More importantly, by drawing the customer closer, the organization will find a refreshing ‘outside-in’ view that leads to budget, resource, and time savings when it comes to new product or service development, customer service and marketing communications.
Keep Reading…
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Customer-Centric: An Operational Practice, Not a Marketing Buzzword
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being introduced to Ron Shevlin, his blog Marketing Tea Party, and his recent post “The Problem With Customer-Centricity.” (Hat tip: Valeria Maltoni.)
Given that I am a proponent for customer-centricity, I could not help but add my thoughts to Ron’s post since it is at the heart of what I practice and believe as a marketer. As well, I am seeing the trend for customer-centric becoming destined for buzzword bingo and I would hate for it to become meaningless well before its benefits are recognized and experienced.
Ron offers a well thought-out case for what customer-centric is and why it may not in the best interest of an organization (be sure to read all of the comments, too). After thoughtful analysis, Ron arrives at this bottom-line:
“… All this talk of customer-centricity is an utter and complete waste of time. The term means nothing. There’s no common definition, no definitive way to measure it, and therefore, no real proof that a company that claims to be customer-centric is any better (for any of the stakeholders) than any other firm.”
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Is Your Message Understood? Five Quick Steps to Make Sure
This weekend I was reading an article in the Fall Harvard Business Review OnPoint magazine (How to Get Your Message Across edition) called “Five Ways to Sharpen Your Communication Skills” by John Baldoni. The article was interesting, but what was more interesting was the comment they selected to share in the Reader Comment section after the article.
John shares these five tips:
- Know the fundamentals (Understand the written and spoken word.)
- Think clearly about what you will say (Don’t use PowerPoint as short-hand for thinking)
- Prepare for meetings (Take the time to think about what to say before you say it.)
- Engage in discussion (Debate. Hear all viewpoints. Don’t engage in group think.)
- Listen to others (Discussion is meaningless if no one is listening. “Measure what you treasure.”)
Sounds like everything we learned in kindergarten, right? Still many marketing, public relations and communications pros struggle with these basic elements when it comes to communicating with customers, stakeholders and other employees.
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Tags: communications, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Measurement, Messaging, Public Relations |
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Customer-Focused versus Customer-Centric, Which Are You?
[Originally posted on Serengeti's Endless Plain blog on 9/16/10. I have edited some of the contents for this post.]
A post by Dawn Westerberg, “Social Media, Customer-Centric, and #IMCchat,” prompted a long response from me, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here too.
If you read THoM, you might already know that every Wednesday night I co-moderate a chat on Twitter called #IMCchat (that’s the Twitter hashtag, if you want to search Twitter), which stands for integrated marketing communications chat. If you are new to Twitter or if you haven’t been on a Twitter chat yet, I highly recommend checking them out (here’s a list of Twitter chats that Meryl Evans keeps up-to-date). Chats are a wonderful way to ask questions or engage in conversation around a topic that is of interest. It’s also great to learn, get advice and share information.
On the September 15th #IMCchat we discussed customer-centric organizations, what defines an organization that is customer-centric and examples (Best Buy, FedEx, Fiskars).
Keep Reading, There’s More Goodness!
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Tags: Anna Barcelos, Audience Research, Customer-Centric, Customer-Focused, IMC, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Product Development, Service Development |
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
