Beyond Branding
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Book Reviews IMC — The Next Generation Don Schultz and Heidi Schultz McGraw-Hill, 2003; 408pp; £29.99 ISBN: 007 1416625
Is it new?
From silo to integration
From CRM to IMC
194
In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molie`re, the nouveau-riche hero Monsieur Jourdain is being taught the social skills that are appropriate to his new, more elevated, social status. He learns to wield a sword and to speak verse among other things, and he enquires of his tutors whether he will have to learn prose as well. They explain that prose is just speech. Jourdain is astounded and has a great line: ‘To think I’ve been talking prose all my life and never knew it.’ Marketing textbooks are getting a bit like that. I cannot fault the theory of integrated marketing communication at all, but then I think it simply restates the common sense that underpinned most marketing practice before we all went searching for new acronyms with which to dazzle each other. IMC (there, I have joined in) has apparently a five-stage planning process. First, you identify customers and prospects. Second, you estimate the value of customers and prospects. Third, you plan communications messages and incentives. Fourth, you estimate the return on customer investment. And fifth, you analyse, evaluate and plan the next moves. Elevating these traditional simplicities to mantra status is a bit like producing a manual for cleaning your teeth. Mind you, someone is probably doing that as well. This new book by the Schulzes records the emergence of IMC in the early 1990s and the speed with which it replaced the top-down ‘silo’ approach to communication where a company’s departments had individual remits — product ranges, geographic areas, above the line, below the line. Three things served to ease the change towards integration. Digital technology made it possible to get close to customers. The new emphasis on branding made the future value of a successful brand more important — or at least as important — as the present income flow. And rapid globalisation meant that marketing lessons could be applied with unprecedented speed right across international markets. Later, of course, the emergence of the internet and e-commerce underpinned the surge towards integration. But where to now? The authors are more than bullish about IMC. For them it is no mere communications strategy — it is a full-fledged business strategy, one that combines all the company’s activities around its customers. At which point we should really bump into another acronym. Whatever happened to CRM? It gets a mention here on page 59. ‘This is where the IMC approach succeeds — and traditional marketing initiatives — even the much-touted CRM — fail.’ Don’t you just love the
& H E N R Y S T E W A R T P U B L I C AT I O N S 1 4 7 8 - 0 8 4 4 ( 2 0 0 5 ) V O L . 7 N O . 2 PP 194–199.
Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice
Book Reviews
International examples
400 pages of common sense
Useful new material on ROI
sneer implicit in the words ‘much-touted’? It is fierce, this acronym business.
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