MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Marketing and Communications

Marketing and Communications

Cutting-edge companies maximize sales performance and customer loyalty by aligning all of the sales, marketing, and customer service programs under a single vision. The key: defining your organization's unique selling proposition and mobilizing all of your key departments to synergistically deliver it.

Overview

Integrated marketing is hardly a new idea. Executives have been talking about its advantages for years, but few took the trouble to practice it. Recent changes in the marketplace, however, mean that companies that hope to survive must give integrated marketing more than lip service.

Today's customers have more, better and faster access to information than ever. Bombarded by competing messages, they can rapidly sift through the information overload to find what they need, and they are better equipped than ever to distinguish false marketing claims from substantive ones. Marketing integration provides companies with a competitive edge by focusing all of the sales, marketing, and operations resources on promoting the same message throughout the customer and prospect base and doing everything possible to make sure that sales and marketing promises get consistently delivered.

Marketing integration not only increases the chances that your organization's message will break through the clutter, but also that your customer's expectations will be consistently met. Integrated strategies not only ensure that your message will have more impact; they can do so with greater cost efficiency than can old-fashioned strategies.

In today's world, mass-marketing is giving way to micro-marketing, by which organizations strive to identify and focus on the people most likely to buy. The one-product-fits all concepts now fit fewer and fewer. Even niche marketing is giving way to one-to-one marketing: tailoring a product or service to the needs of a single customer.

Under the traditional organization structure, the sales and marketing message gets fragmented across myriad strategies and tactics. Marketing often develops messages that the salespeople fail to sell or which contain service promises that operations or customer service fail to deliver. At big organizations, even marketing messages become fragmented across medium, meaning that advertising, promotion, and other marketing tactics fail to leverage each other or, even worse, work at cross-purposes. The results: declining brand loyalty and excessive marketing costs.

Definition

Integrated marketing mobilizes all of a company's marketing and sales strategies under a single vision and strategy implemented in concert by all of the organization's relevant departments.

In the traditional model, a company is made up of discrete departments dedicated to a specific discipline, such as sales, marketing, market research, customer service, advertising, promotion, public relations, trade shows, events, information technology, manufacturing, and distribution. Often, they seem to operate in their own little worlds, with the result that management "silos" emerge by which different departments operate with different agendas and often not in concert.

In the integrated marketing model, an enterprise becomes a cohesive unit with a single overall goal based on maximizing awareness among the target audience and making sure that the marketing promises get consistently distributed across all sales and marketing media, and that they get consistently delivered at the point of ...