The Integrated Marketing Imperative

digiday reporting:
There are more ways than ever for marketers to reach consumers. That’s put more pressure than ever brands to come up with integrated approaches, a topic that’s been hot in the marketing industry for years.
The key for brands looking to take an integrated approach is to have a strong collaboration and communication between teams. But this can some times be hard since the majority of brands have a traditional agency, a media buying agency, a social media agency, adding to the challenge of implementing an integrated effort.
Within each agency partner there’s a number of creative ideas all jockeying for a position on the client’s priority list. Couple this with the fact that blurry lines can exist between who owns social and mobile responsibilities across these partners and you can easily see how brands appear to have disjointed marketing efforts. There’s ways of getting around this. Brands need to ensure that all of their agency partners are organized around a common goal and that they openly communicate with one another. Too often that’s not the case.
“It’s probably not done on purpose, rather it’s more of a symptom caused by how many companies are organized internally to tackle these various marketing channels,” said Brett Leary, vp and director of mobile marketing at Digitas. “A lot of companies are naturally organized similarly to how budgets are siloed. Each of these stakeholders may have different incentive structures driving their decisions and all probably have budgetary challenges causing them to act quickly to avoid losing funding.”
An integrated approach ensures that all the touchpoints work together to deliver a consistent branded experience to the consumer. This can lead to customer loyalty and advocacy and better campaign results. Take what LVMH-owned Hennessy did in November of last year for the promotion of its collaboration with the artist Kaws for a limited-edition bottle. The campaign, which centered on a video, resulted in 1.3 million scans of the QR code that was created for the effort. One50One created the campaign for Hennessy.
http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-integrated-marketing-imperative/