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The start of any race sounds like a sprint. And like the start of a 100-yard dash,
learning that IM is about to take root excites marketers. But developing a sound strategy
is an endurance race. Here's one way to run it.
It was 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. My briefcase was packed and I was ready to race out the door.
But as I took my first step, in walked the boss, wearing “that look.” It was one I knew all too well,
the one that meant, “You’re not going anywhere.”
He told me that senior management had
finally committed to the concept of “integrated marketing.”
And I grinned. IM, at last! I’d been pushing for it for
months, because I knew it was right for our brand. And I felt pretty darn good.
That was good news. The bad news was the corporate brass wanted a plan… in a month.
Do-able? Perhaps. Optimal? Are you kidding? Of course not. But we had no choice. We knew that
integrated marketing was making its move at companies of every size and shape. And that it was
either climb aboard the bandwagon, or get run over by it. So there was nothing to do but plunge
into the task.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? As if that's any comfort or makes the task easier. However,
integrated marketing isn’t a sprint. It's an endurance race that needs a well-considered
game-plan. Here’s how we thought about and planned the IM strategy we recommend.
Identify Customers and Their Needs
Every successful integrated marketing strategy begins with the customer. So we asked each
other: Do we really know our customers? Who are they? What do they like to do? Why do they
buy our brand? How do they buy it?
What we were talking about was developing a customer profile that included key demographics,
psychographics, purchase dynamics, you name it. It helped us bring our customers to life, take
their pulse, and find out what really made them tick.
Become an Information Expert
As trite as it may sound, “Do your homework!” still makes incredible sense.
History is fact. It tells us what’s worked and what’s flopped. So we scoured the landscape
for as much relevant information about our brand as we could find. Developing a strategically-sound
IM strategy depended on it. Why? We knew that by being well-grounded in both historical and current
information we’d be regarded as knowledgeable, credible experts. Better still, our expertise made us
influential. All of which was the foundation for gaining the ultimate approval of our recommended IM
strategy. As a CEO once quipped, “Without facts, you’re just another guy with an opinion.”
At the same time, we knew we had to watch out for “information overload.” So we merged and edited
information ruthlessly. And we identified specific findings that had actionable implications for
our strategy. These provided us with some handy checks and balances during our planning, and a
substantive rationale for selling our ultimate plan.
Understand Business Goals and Set Expectations
We didn’t plan in a vacuum. We got a solid grasp on our corporate objectives as they related to
volume, profit, and share. We also found out what our brand was expected to contribute, and how
quickly. We diligently monitored senior management, as well: If we detected any assumptions that
our integrated marketing strategy would be regarded as a quick, short-term cure-all, we swung
immediately into “education mode.”
Top level commitment to integrated marketing philosophy is one thing. Understanding and accepting
the time it takes to do it right is something else. To that end, we provided a detailed timeline
for our strategy’s development and implementation and tried to be realistic with our commitments.
Create a Planning Team
The beauty of integrated marketing is that it embraces all the elements of the marketing mix. It
made sense, then, to tap experts for help. We looked at experts from: advertising…national consumer
promotion… account-specific/trade promotion… public relations…database/direct marketing… corporate
communications… in-store merchandising… premiums and incentive… packaging… the
Internet… sponsorships/events… and design. From this group we identified the marketing disciplines
most critical to our business, then invited one rep from each of them to join our team. To the
degree possible, we selected teammates who were creative, open-minded, non-territorial, and -
above all - committed to the concept that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” We
knew, too, that our overall success depended on our ability to effectively guide and manage this
team through the planning process. And that meant appointing a leader who could be an educator,
facilitator, and “leading influence.”
Establish Objectives and a Strategy
As a team, we identified and set objectives, i.e. exactly “what” we planned to accomplish. Like
all objectives, they were measurable, time-specific, and targeted to generate a required response
from our customer base. With objectives in hand, we established our integrated marketing strategy -
“how” we would accomplish each objective (in a few cases, one strategy would accomplish more than
one objective). We also identified the specific role that each marketing element would play in
achieving our objectives - and recommended specific spending levels. Finally, we put our goals
and strategies on paper, and didn’t move an inch further until we had senior management’s buy-in.
Determine the Message
As a team, we next developed a meaningful, consistent and uniform message that conveyed our brand’s
essence. As part of this process, we asked: What made it unique or distinctive? Why should our
consumers buy it? What value-added benefits did its purchase deliver? Peppering each other with
these questions helped shape our message. So did the brand’s positioning. We used it to help build
brand equity and as the communication link for our overall IM strategy.
Evaluate Your Tools
The integrated marketer can select from more than 20 tools, from advertising to in-store
merchandising to promotion to public relations to database marketing to the Internet. We selected
our tools with care, based on where and how we could reach our best customers. Consulting with our
experts helped us understanding each tool’s opportunities and limitations. Their opinions also
helped us blend the tools into an effective integrated marketing program. So did reviewing what
had worked and what didn’t.
Build the Program
An executive attending one of our seminars in Rye, N.Y., challenged me with this question: “How
do you create programs from tactics?” I replied, “The best place to start is with yourself.” So
we kept a running list of all the program ideas that came to mind or were suggested during our
planning process. Most often, we opted for the big, “out-of-the-box” idea. We figured it was always
easier to start big; if we had to cut back, so be it.
Then we conducted a few brainstorming sessions with subsets of our planning team; we invited other
creative souls within our organization to participate, too. Groups of 10 were most effective,
moderated by an unbiased outside facilitator to clearly communicate the objectives and set ground
rules. We set an overriding rule: “No idea is a bad idea.” Not every idea rose to the top, but a
few did. Once we refined them, they helped us fulfill our objectives and strategy. Notably, we
also picked a few back-up ideas. And we put everything in writing: a description if each program,
estimated costs, and rationales.
Sell with Passion
We could see the finish line in the distance. But before we crossed it we had to sell our integrated
marketing recommendations, in every sense of the word. We arranged a meeting with the corporate
decision makers who held the purse strings, and made sure that our entire team attended. Our team
led the meeting, and carefully reviewed the objectives and strategy that have been approved by
senior management. We presented the key findings, reviewed the process we had used and succinctly
outlined our team’s recommendations. During the meeting, four key team members shared their
expertise. We invited questions. Most important, we asked for approval of our recommendations.
Are we winning? What do you think?
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