Contact management: Branding is no longer a line item, it’s a lifestyle
Controlling and orchestrating the myriad of marketing disciplines to increase effectiveness is one goal of IMC, and a term coined at Northwestern University, “all points of brand contact,” is at play here (Schultz & Schultz, 2004). Without getting into a specific tome on IMC, one component of brand integration is a holistic unification of every point of contact. Anyone reading this understands IMC and its benefits: In the costly world of marketing, diluting or forfeiting any morsel of the message is unsound, but it happens all the time. The usual cause can begin to be attributed to a lack of internal integration. There isn’t a company we’ve first talked to in the last 25 years with perfectly aligned strategies and operational marketing structure. Why? A number of reasons: job mobility and the inherent creation of new agendas (marketing directors have an average life span of less than two years), soiled organizational structures, politics, rapid change, and the inability to update quickly, short-term quarterly report thinking, and inattentive discipline. It is no small task to herd these cats, yet it is a mandatory dimension of marketing success.
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