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…

What Integrated Marketing Is Not

Integrated marketing is not consistent branding and messaging across tactics alone.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

One of the many challenges that The New Marketing Paradigm attempted to address were silos (other challenges included the lack of customer-centricity, planning, and measurement). Messages and branding from marketing, communications, branding, and PR were consistently out of whack with each other—leaving customers and prospects to put the pieces together themselves. Talk about ineffective.

Fast forward. Silos still rear their ugly heads (we see social media putting a spotlight on them), but for the most part organizations have gotten smarter about why it is smart to integrate their branding and messaging.

That said, marketing and communications today still seems to be lead by the basic and simple act of integrating tactics to feed the lead generation beast. That mindset presents new challenges. By thinking that tactics have been integrated across channels it’s a job well done, marketers put themselves at risk of wasting precious resources, time, and budget. Why? Because integrated tactics alone do not deliver on*:

• Relevance
• Receptivity
• Response
• Recognition
• Relationship

Without truly knowing who customers are, when they are open to messages, how they prefer to respond, if they relate to the brand, and how they feel about the organization, it is nearly impossible to be targeted. That is where the data-driven part of integration comes to bear. Without outside-in data, “spray and pray” marketing will continue to be prevalent.

Obviously, I am simplifying this to make a point. It would take a book to dive in deeper!

(*To learn more about the Five R’s and the value they deliver, be sure to pick up a copy of IMC, The Next Generation : Five Steps For Delivering Value and Measuring Financial Returns by Don E. Schultz and Heidi Schultz.)

What Integrated Marketing Is

“GE executives described a stagnant GE when Jack Welch took over as CEO in 1981: “[GE is a company] … with its face to the CEO and its ass to the customer.”

I pulled that gem of a quote from Ranjay Gulati’s most excellent book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.

Which direction is your organization facing? Let’s dive in before your backside catches a chill.

IMC: The Next Generation presents eight guiding principles of integration:

1. Become a customer-centric organization
2. Use outside-in planning
3. Focus on the total customer experience
4. Align customer goals with corporate objectives
5. Set customer behavior objectives
6. Treat customers as assets
7. Streamline functional activities
8. Converge marcom activities (this one we get, what about the others?)

The main struggle for product-centric companies when it comes to integrated marketing is the ability to realize customer-centricity and treating customers as assets.

Understanding Customer-Centricity

In Reorganize for Resilience, Gulati observed the following traits of truly customer-centric companies. They:

• Changed the conversation with their customers to one that is more outside-in and focused on how they can help address customer-articulated needs;
• Became problem solvers, not sellers;
• Focused on the set of customer problems they want to solve and are less concerned with the means and more focused on the ends;
• Developed a culture where customer centricity and outside-in behavior is their way of life.

Jay Galbraith describes the same tenets in his book, Designing The Customer-Centric Organization. Customer-centric companies focus on:

• Personalization and customization for the best customer solution
• Strategy supporting the most profitable, loyal customers
• Structure based on customer segments, teams and P&L
• Rewards given to employees who save customer business
• Sales bias on the side of the customer

Integrated Marketing, It’s “The Obvious,” Right?

We hear about the success of the same companies repeatedly. You know who they are: Dell, IBM, Cisco, FedEx, Lafarge, Best Buy, Target, and Southwest. There is a reason for that. The pool of customer-centric companies with truly integrated marketing is more like a puddle.

It has been with purpose for the past year that I have blogged about integration. I truly believe in integration and the value it delivers (how can the evidence be disputed?). As well, I have helped companies with integration in my career and know that it works.

(Note: integration is tough work and it’s not easy to become truly customer-centric, but that isn’t an excuse to move forward with it.)

For those marketers solely guided by revenue generation and shareholder wealth, try this stat on for size:

“…customer-driven companies were significantly more successful than shareholder-driven ones, providing a 36 percent advantage in shareholder returns, compared with their industry median; shareholder-aligned organizations provided only a 17 percent advantage.” – Reorganize for Resilience

Who wouldn’t want those returns?!

Your Job Moving Forward

The next time an agency or consultant is offering integrated marketing be sure to request a plan that is truly integrated (especially the five R’s)  and data-centric and see what you get in response. If it’s  full of tactics that have been “obviously” integrated with lack of regard for much else, you know what to do.

Integrated marketing: it’s the not so “obvious” marketing… after all. (Sort of like the “other white meat.”)

P.S. If you truly want to understand integrated marketing and it’s benefits, pick up the books mentioned in this post along with Kellogg on Integrated Marketing.

[Image Source: hypebeast.com]

Failed icon. Sounds like dismal hook to hang one’s hat on doesn’t it? Especially given that most of us have such an aversion to failure in life and business—or even being associated to failure in any way.

When you think of failure, would you consider someone who:

• has spent a large amount of their career on educating and helping corporations and marketers to become customer-centric;
• is a Professor Emeritus at a well-known university that has a graduate program to educate students in being data-driven to ensure that customers’ needs and wants are met;
• has written over 10 books on subjects like driving and determining brand value and measuring ROI; and
• was named one of the 80 Most Influential People in sales and marketing a failure?

No, I wouldn’t either.

And yet, that’s exactly how Don Schultz, one of the founding fathers of integrated marketing communications referred to himself at Blur (‘The Conference that Erases Lines’), the recent PMA Annual Integrated Marketing Conference.

Schultz stated, “…that after 20 years of integration, IMC, IM and all the other versions and visions that we’re no closer to developing a holistic, customer-focused, marketing and communication system than before.”

20 years have gone by and companies are still no closer to putting the customer first? Seems odd that a company wouldn’t put the people who willing to part with their hard-earned cash to buy their products and services first, doesn’t it? But that is reality for the majority of businesses out there.

Integrated Marketing Communications: It Isn’t What You May Think It Is

When IMC was first introduced, the mission was simple: “One sight and one sound.” Because then the challenge revolved around multiple, siloed departments reaching out to customers in accordance with their revenue generation or communications plans. On the receiving end were the customers, who were left to analyze and pull together all of the assorted messages in order to make sense of what it was the advertiser, marketer, publicist, and sales person wanted them to do. As we know today, that simply doesn’t work (and it most likely didn’t work then either).

According to Schultz all of these years later, “…it only added value to the marketers, not the consumers. It was all “outbound” where we were trying to influence and persuade the customer to buy/try our product/service…”

And yet, most companies that practice integrated marketing communications today are still in this phase of “one sight and one sound.” That’s where, unfortunately, the notion of what IMC is has come to rest in most marketers’ minds.

Barriers Are More Dangerous than Silos to your Business

It’s rare to see a company organized completely around its customers and it will probably be another 15 years before we are even close to that being the norm. As in the past, there are still many silos today. But at least the silos are seemingly working together (branding and marketing communications; marketing and PR; or customer services and sales, for example) to achieve one sight and one sound. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start.

Barriers to becoming customer-centric include:

• Resistance to change
• Organizational structures
• Functional separations and budgets
• Capabilities and control
• Marketing planning systems

Whether as customers or employees, we have all seen these barriers. And they are as smart as putting a concrete barrier in front of your corporate headquarters.

The good news? The world has indeed changed.

Schultz went on to say that “…when he and the rest of the marketing “icons” weren’t looking, the world changed. Today’s information technology has given consumers control.”

If IMC is So Good, Why Isn’t It Being Implemented?

This very question was asked by Loyd Pettegrew, Ph.D. in his 2000 article of the same name. Dr. Pettegrew points out eight conditions that a company must adhered to accurately reflect the practice of IMC:

1. Must speak to all stakeholders with a single, consistent voice
2. Must assume the consumers’/customers’ point of view
3. Strategic communications disciplines must be internally integrated
4. It must have a clear and consistent message that is more effective and efficient than competing messages
5. Messages must cut through the increasingly cluttered commercial landscape
6. Must foster two-way dialogue between consumers and itself
7. Must build bonds that lead to long-term, consumer-to-brand relationships
8. Must not place excellent marketing ahead of corporate reputation

I’d like to add a number nine: Top-down management buy-in for becoming customer-centric.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I hope you are making the natural bridge to social media. As Don Schultz has stated, consumers [and customers] now have control. As such, it will be hard for companies to not start adhering to these 9 conditions if they want to be successful socially. If not, we will begin to see a lot of failed icons in the social media space.

Failed Icon or Visionary?

I am going with the latter. Let’s just hope that this time around, we all get it right. Because in the age of social media I don’t think consumers and customers will give us a second chance (as we’ve seen evidence of already).

[Image Source: The Gig Girl]

I have the honor of being a part of the new Social Media Council of Advisors for the Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) and last Thursday we had our first Q&A webinar with MENG members. Other council members include: Amber Naslund, Mack Collier, Drew McLellan, Joe Pulizzi and Paul Dunay.

Last Thursday we had a Q&A webinar with MENG members. There were a lot of great questions, but one question really struck me and I wanted to share it here because it speaks to why integrated marketing and communications is critical.

“All of the panelists agree that social media are exciting new ways to listen and communicate, but they are basically new tools. So how do we get across to the marketing community that boring old marketing disciplines still apply and how do we get rid of this silly dichotomy between social media marketing and classic marketing.”

My basic response was that social media tools are not new and some have been around for ten years or more. And second, there isn’t a dichotomy because social media needs to be integrated.

I think this is a serious discussion that needs to take place because there marketers and marketing executives who have been given the wrong impression or direction when it comes to social media.

Integrating Social Media

First, I am not a fan of the term ‘social media marketing’ because a) it silos social media from other marketing communications tactics and other marketing disciplines and b) because a lot of folks out there are implementing social media tools without understanding the nature (or theory) of marketing as a whole. Second, as an integrated marketing practitioner, I totally disagree that ‘social media marketing’ is replacing classic marketing (or the theory that comes with it).

What’s new and important is how these tools are being used in business; how we have a window into what our customers are really thinking, where they interact, how to engage with them, etc.; and how we now have data to serve our customers BETTER.

But this notion of knowing our customers isn’t anything new…that’s basic marketing (and I mean ALL of marketing here, not just the promotional aspect of marketing), public relations and communications.

While CRM systems have been the tool of choice for keeping track of customers and extracting data  they never really allowed marketers to put faces to names (unless there’s some stealth way to take a photo and add it to your CRM), to listen to conversations or to actively engage in a two-way manner. The only tool that allows that is social media.

The key to integration today is simple. Marketers need to be flexible, able to adjust, and most importantly able to provide pertinent AND timely information when, where and how customers/potential customers need/want it. Social media allows for that across all areas of marketing (product, pricing, promotion and distribution).

Who/What Is Creating the Dichotomy?

I think the most important issue here, however, is who/what is creating the dichotomy? Who or what is causing marketers to think that it’s an either/or situation?

Is it that we’ve been siloed for so long and that there hasn’t been a good job with integration to begin with? We only need to look at E-Mail Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Direct Marketing to get a sense of the answer.

As social media evangelists and practitioners we need to truly understand what is going on in our industry. Otherwise, we are doing a disservice to our customers and future as marketers.

Your thoughts?

The hiatus is over! For those who have been loyal readers of this blog, Happy New Year! And I thank you for hanging in there with me while I took the time to consider where to head next.

For a long time I focused on marketing, PR and social media, but rarely the integration of them all. The focus of The Harte of Marketing for 2010 (and perhaps beyond) will be integrated marketing & communications. While integrated marketing communications (IMC) is nothing new, the embracing of social media surely puts IMC back in the spotlight as its principles are similar to long-standing IMC principles.

I have often said that social media isn’t shaking the foundations of marketing or public relations; it’s just driving us home to our roots, which seem to be long forgotten. The same is true of the integration of communications (advertising, branding, PR, direct marketing, etc.) or marketing functions (the 4 Ps)…many people have been integrating since the 90s and for them this will be nothing new, but I hope to add a few twists and turns even they weren’t expecting.

The Eight Guiding Principles of IMC

I am a long-time student of Don Schultz (interview with Don), professor emeritus-in-service of integrated marketing communications, Northwestern University, as well as Larry Percy, Clarke Caywood, Robert Lauterborn, Philip Kotler and all the other folks who worked diligently to put customers at the forefront of our marketing and communications. While times have changed since they first wrote and educated on IMC, the need to prove value to management has not. These are the eight guiding principles from Don Schultz’s book “IMC: The Next Generation. Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns Using Marketing Communications.(2003)”

• Principle 1: Become a Customer-Centric Organization
• Principle 2: Use Outside-in Planning
• Principle 3: Focus on the Total Customer Experience
• Principle 4: Align Consumer Goals with Corporate Objectives
• Principle 5: Set Customer Behavior Objectives
• Principle 6: Treat Customers as Assets
• Principle 7: Streamline Functional Activities
• Principle 8: Converge Marcom Activites

These principles don’t seem earth-shattering, do they? Then why is it many organizations today still struggle? Helping organizations make these principles a normal course of their business operations (and more!) will be the focus here and I hope you’ll come along for the ride!