Designing Holistic Marketing Activities
Customers come to know a brand through a range of contacts and touch points: personal observation and use, word of mouth, interactions with company personnel, online or telephone experiences, and payment transactions. A brand contact is any information-bearing experience, whether positive or negative, a customer or prospect has with the brand, its product category or its market.
The company must put as much effort into managing these experiences as into producing its ads because any brand contact can affect consumers’ brand knowledge and the way they think, feel, or act toward the brand.
Although strategies for implementation differ from one company to the next, every holistic marketing approach includes four or more main components: relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, and Performance marketing.
In this chapter we focus on Integrated Marketing. The other three are covered in next chapters.
Integrated marketing is about mixing and matching marketing activities to maximize their individual and collective effects.
Marketers need a variety of different marketing activities that consistently reinforce the brand promise, working singularly and in combination. We can evaluate integrated marketing activities in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency with which they affect brand awareness and create, maintain, or strengthen brand associations and image.
Example: Integrated Marketing Snickers
Snickers is one of my favorite chocolate bars, so I paid close attention when I started to see commercials for their You’re Not You When You’re Hungry advertisements. Launched at the 2010 Super Bowl, this Snickers campaign has remained top-of-mind for chocolate and candy lovers everywhere.
One reason for this is the campaign’s humor, but the other, more pertinent reason is that Snickers pasted this movement everywhere … on its website, social media, TV, print ads, and more, and they included plenty of celebrities to boot. By presenting an aligned, cohesive integrated marketing campaign, customers now think of Snickers when craving a sweet snack — and the company has benefitted as a result.
In future chapters the other three main components of Holistic Marketing will be covered. In case you already want to know the definition of all four components, take a sneak-peak below
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