Marketing's Best Toolbox Remains Elusive

A pipe bursts in your house. When the local handyman arrives, he is carrying a large toolbox. Without even looking at the pipe, he opens the box to reveal only one tool: a hammer. He takes it out and brings it crashing down on the broken pipe - for an hour. With the pipe destroyed, he asks for $100 and leaves.

This provides an accurate analogy for the state of the marketing communications industry. The fanfare that greeted the emergence of integrated marketing communications in the early 90s has died away, leaving the industry uncomfortably aware that it still represents a series of one-trick ponies. Advertising agencies still espouse solutions that centre on advertising, PR agencies always suggest PR, direct agencies suggest direct marketing and so on.

Like our handyman, each fails to diagnose the problem correctly and opts to solve all their clients' communications issues with one tool. Ask WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. Not too long ago he bemoaned the fact that most agencies "redefine every problem in terms of their proposed solution".

As Sir Martin knows, different communications tools have different strengths.

This has two implications. First, a company must completely diagnose the communication challenge before it assigns the communications tools to be used in its strategy. For many clients, tools such as advertising, PR or sponsorship will prove entirely ineffective no matter how well they are applied because they are wrong for the job. Second, by combining two or more communication tools into an integrated campaign, a company is likely to realise significant synergies.

An integrated strategy that spreads its budget across a combination of PR, direct marketing and events marketing is guaranteed to have a greater impact than a campaign that opts to spend the total budget on just one of them.

The ideal model is obvious: a handyman with a variety of tools who first studies the problem, then selects multiple tools to solve it. But this model has proved impossible to replicate in marketing communications terms.

Despite owning an impressive list of different organisations that represent every major communications tool, WPP has consistently failed to get its organisations to work together for clients' common good. The concept of an integrated campaign in which BPRI does the research, Added Value positions the brand, Landor designs the new corporate identity, Y&R does the media advertising, Burson-Marsteller does the PR and Ogilvy Direct runs the customer relationship management strategy remains a pipe dream.

Integration on the supply side will never occur. Turf wars, egos and a lack of common systems and understanding mean agencies will remain segregated.

The only potential site of integration resides on the demand side with the client. It is up to clients to diagnose their problems, select specialist agencies across the communications spectrum and motivate these groups to work to a single strategic agenda. Unfortunately, clients with the skills, power and confidence to achieve this are thin on the ground. For now, integration will remain the holy grail of marketing.

Courtesy of Marketing Magazine

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Comments

[Peter Korchnak]

Thanks for the post, great analogy.

If marketing is about satisfying customer needs, and clients lack the skill to diagnose their problems, what keeps us marketers from helping our prospects and clients with that? A service is a conversation, so when clients don't see certain areas need marketing improvement, it's up to us marketers to start that conversation.

[Kevin Clancy]

Very interesting post. We had thought the idea of IMC had kind of died as well. Until, that is, we read an ANA study in May that found a majority of marketers (74%) report using integrated marketing communications campaigns for most or all of their brands.

Interestingly, the two big barriers to sucessful IMC were the existence of functional silos (59%) and lack of strategic consistency across communications disciplines (42%). Apparently these two major complaints have come up when the ANA did the survey before in 2003 and 2006.

To your point, agencies haven't made the problem any better (and may have accerbated the two major issues above). The way the "full service" model worked in practice had each division of an agency--advertising, PR, direct, interactive, promotions, events, etc.--competing against each other for the biggest piece of a client's marketing budget. It was like handing a bunch of five-year-olds one cookie and telling them to share it. And like you said, everyone had their own idea about how to solve and approach the problem.

We're strategy folks, so our take on where the leak in the IMC pumbing is is in the strategy area. Without a targeting and positioning strategy that's relevant and useable across the entire marketing organization, there's nothing to bring the different functional areas together or encourage consistency.

To expand on your handyman analogy, he studies the problem and if he doesn't want to waste a whole lot of time and effort just taking out different combinations of tools that may or may not work, he comes up with a STRATEGY--how, when, and what am I going to use to make the repair? Only then does he get out the tools he'll need to solve the problem.