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INTEGRATED MARKETING FOR LONG TERM PROSPERITY |
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| By Alan W. Gladish, President, Praxis Communications, Inc. I’ve spent the better part of the past 35 years of my life in industry, first as a principal for a machinery manufacturer, then running a marketing/advertising agency serving industrial clients. In that time I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing and advertising for business-to-business clients. The right approach seems obvious now, but until several years ago, we did not work strategically for our accounts. Instead, we reacted to what our clients asked us to do. And we did a pretty good job, considering the objectives of each tactic. However, Project A seldom correlated with Projects B, C, or D, resulting with each discrete activity (advertising, brochure, trade show, etc) not pulling any relative value from the work applied to its sister activities. No integration meant that we had to re-invent each tactic on its own merits, rather than consider the powerful influence of the total marketing program and all the media. There’s a lot of talk these days about strategic planning. Is this some Whartonian concept strictly for academics, or is it a realistic activity that can help your business grow? The best way to describe strategy is simply to say “plan.” Once you get past all the rhetoric, that’s all we’re talking about. Nevertheless, few companies actually plan a year or more ahead. Business owners look for financial performance by the quarter, rather than build equity over the long haul. Marketing directors want the greatest number of qualified leads from each exposure, rather than considering the total effect of their branding opportunity. Today’s quick turnaround and ambitious performance expectations seem to have eclipsed the tried-and-true methods employed in the day when marketing experts utilized the power of a strong brand. They used a simple, yet memorable message to enhance awareness and build brand preference over time. Of course, nothing is as simple as it appears. Indeed, the people who branded Xerox and Band Aid – two of the most well known brand icons of the 20th century – are considered genius in the advertising world today. Most importantly, it takes an understanding of the power of branding plus commitment and consistency to achieve success. If you think this only works in consumer markets, think again. When we decided, several years ago, to work with our clients on a long-term strategic relationship, we used as the basis of our plans an activity called positioning. For each of our clients, it gave us an opportunity to research precisely what strengths the company had compared to their competition. For most of these clients, we already had a prior relationship as their advertising agency, but we were surprised with some of the new perceptions gained from the situation analysis. So, what’s different today? By positioning our clients, based on their relevant differentiated benefits, and through careful planning and a strategically defined creative approach, each client is experiencing positive results. We’re meeting bottom line objectives for inquiry generation and awareness building for some, and strengthening brand preference with others, allowing them to command better margins on their products. What we’re NOT doing is reacting to the crisis du jour. We have done this because we used what we learned from positioning (an internal discipline) and applied it to the activity of branding (an external communications technique). Sounds logical, right? Then, why don’t more business executives make commitments to long-term plans and fund them appropriately to meet their objectives? Because, I presume, executives today think they can get more cost control of their marketing activities by keeping their options open and reacting to short-term marketing opportunities, rather than by sticking to a single, strong positioning for several years. In fact, the reverse proves true. Ad hoc activities usually cost considerably more than those mapped out in advance. The cost of day-to-day management in human resources usually runs higher. Better to settle that ahead of time and apply those costs to potentially more useful activities. It’s Marketing 101, but it seems so foreign to current trends. Here’s our 7-step approach for achieving our clients’ goals:
In addition to trusting the process, most companies have less than satisfactory relationships with their advertising agencies. So another big issue starts with trusting the agency in relation to making a long-term commitment. Typically, agency/client relationships are characterized by a push-pull dynamic. The agency tries its best to complete as many activities as it can (and bill the client for them), and the client continually attempts to nudge the agency towards a creative direction according to the opportunity of the day. Often, the time and energy expended struggling over the tactical approach and reconciling billing issues exceeds the focus on meeting objectives. We’ve solved this problem by asking our clients to pay us a fixed annual fee for our services. We can do this because we’ve mapped out the plan a year ahead. We have an agreement in January on what we’ll do in July. Of course, we can still capitalize on unanticipated opportunities, but the principle focus of our efforts remains on meeting the long-term objectives of the program. The fixed fee rarely changes month-to-month throughout the year. In the end, the client always gets more than he paid for. The advantage for everyone is the complete elimination of the adversarial relationship, and the freedom to become true advocates for our clients. It should be said that this “leap of faith” is often very difficult, especially with an untried relationship. So we offer our new clients a way to date before we marry, by working with them on a single well-defined project or activity until we develop the trust necessary to take that leap. This may sound counterintuitive to a strategic approach, but it’s realistic considering the long-term stakes. Planning is hard work, make no mistake. We spend months evaluating lead data, investigating media editorial schedules, identifying on-going public relations opportunities, and assembling an integrated spreadsheet of activities every year. But the outcome of utilizing a strong marketing communications strategy always proves more powerful and effective than the sum of a non-integrated short-term approach. |
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