Innovation + Integration = Success

The marketing discipline is fraught with uncertainty, and we’re all feeling it.

“Brand compression” is occurring across categories; there’s an increasing lack of differentiation and growing competition. “Budget compression” is happening in most companies; it’s that great management challenge to do more with less. Those trends might be tolerable if it weren’t for “consumer promiscuity,” with the love gone (or going) out of many brands and businesses.

The proliferation of marketing tools is making planning more difficult: You can now run your ad on ATMs and in restroom stalls, so what’s next?

What’s next is the dramatic decline of media effectiveness. Reach is down, and costs are up. Consumers are disinterested, desensitized, and unresponsive, internal factors are cramping your style, competition is coming at you from private labels and elsewhere, the sales organization is screaming, and no one has The Answer.

What every marketer wants is profitable revenues. Revenues come from sales. And sales come from transactions. Retail sales are all about transactions, with success measured by sales per square foot, same-store sales, inventory turnover, throughput. (Wal-Mart even tracks its cashiers on how quickly they complete each checkout.)

Brand marketing, on the other hand, is all about adding value for consumers. Buy my brand at something above the commodity (private-label) price, and I’ll give you something – better functionality, better imagery, more satisfaction, a stronger guarantee, some social benefit. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, transactional.

But many marketing managers seem to be evolving into transaction managers, caring little about where sales and market share come from and simply wanting more, more, more. Marketing has become the fine art of price-discounting, disguised in many forms.

As long as everyone’s focus remains primarily on transaction-building, there isn’t much hope for brand marketers to get any relief for brand-building. The choice for marketers is either to become transaction managers and sell indiscriminately, or to find ways to add value to targeted consumer groups over time, with focus and consistency and relevance – while getting short-term sales for career preservation.

The answer to finding profitable revenue growth is two-pronged: first comes Innovation, then Integration. These powerful ingredients can get you the short-term transactions you need to survive, as well as the long-term brand value that’ll make your stock options multiply.

HIGHLY EFFECTIVE HABITS

How do you develop an integrated marketing plan with the most innovative ideas ever seen? I’ve seen it happen in seven “easy” steps:

1. Hire the best and brightest specialists you can. To integrate, you must first discriminate. Find the people who know how to position your brand, raise its awareness, and cause positive purchasing behavior. These may be people inside your organization, or one multi-disciplined agency network, or a host of separate agencies.

2. It’s your job to insist that these specialists work together, collaborate, share. With your marketing experts, develop a written set of standard operating procedures. Make sure the list includes: open and honest communication at all times, no single ownership of the idea, respect for the other disciplines, media-neutrality at the outset. Make sure your team gets constant feedback from you on how well they’re working together. If they aren’t, lower the boom quickly.

3. Give clear and concise direction to the team. Describe what you want, what defines success, what the business needs. “I need 10 million new users.” “I need 70-percent ACV distribution.” “I need to increase my hit-to-order conversion ratio by plus-25 percent.” “I need to double sales.” Lay down the challenge, and make it a bold one.

4. Explain to the team what your risk-tolerance is, how much inertia you and they need to overcome, how long you and they have to survive. Be honest. Be urgent.

5. Let them percolate. There needs to be plenty of “forming,” “storming,” and “norming” before they begin “performing.” Positive stimulation helps.

6. Listen to their recommendations, and listen for the positives. Don’t pull out your gun and start blasting. If ideas aren’t fully baked yet, say so with compassion. Help fix things that need it.

7. Bless the idea that achieves your stated objectives. Make sure your team implements flawlessly.

There is a lot of opportunity to be innovative with your consumer promotion plan and ensure that it’s integrated into your other marketing programs. Otherwise, you might as well be a transaction manager.