Integrated New Marketing

Best Practice: Integrated Marketing

When thinking about the challenges of Marketing Integration, marketers would be well served to take the counsel of the old Chinese proverb that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.

All too frequently, marketers take the “moon-shot” approach in pursuing integration, looking to go from a standstill to full integration in a single step. The problem is that this is sufficiently disorienting, complex, and expensive so that few marketing management teams and organizations are able to pull it off in one fell swoop.

Far more pragmatic is to view integration as an initiative that involves multiple, piece by piece changes that follow a blueprint toward integration of the whole. The trick is to find value in each of the steps so that the elements can be justified on their own, short-term merits, and then add additional value as they are interconnected—achieving the broader integration.

Instructive have been the very pragmatic steps taken by the Cable Co’s and the U.S. Telephone players in their recent implementations of the “Triple Plays”—joining video, internet and telephony products. There are enormous opportunities to integrate the products in these bundles, but the lead times and developmental costs will be substantial. Rather than wait for the ability to fully integrate the products, the market leaders were quick to integrate the marketing message and simply “price bundle” the products, linking them into single $99.95/month price packages.

If you’d like to discuss the thoughts/challenges you face in integrating aspects of your marketing, simply call MCAworks at 203.256.9944, ext 11.

Contact John Hawkins for more information.