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integrated brand marketing

Although brand identity management and advertising are two of the more important and visible components of brand management, I hope that by the time you have finished reading this book you will agree that brand management is much more holistic and interdependent than that.

For instance, a typical marketing budget is divided among the following activities: advertising, promotion, trade shows, lead generation, other sales support (collateral materials), website, Internet marketing, direct mail, telemarketing, publicity, brand identity management, and market research. Some companies devote marketing resources to pricing strategy/management, product marketing, channel marketing, and trade relations. If the company makes consumer products, add packaging to that. If it has a retail component, add merchandising and possibly purchasing. Some organizations put sales under this umbrella as well. Don’t forget about communicating with industry and financial analysts, too. Finally, add internal brand building activities and brand management legal activities (trademarks, copyrights, etc.), and you have a very complicated, interdependent set of activities that require skill-specific subdisciplines and effective integrating mechanisms.

At most companies, not a day goes by that marketers are not trying to integrate one or more of these activities with others. Consider just one marketing discipline: trade shows. Trade shows support product marketing plans and help generate sales leads, which go into the marketing database. Trade shows must also reinforce the brand promise and the most recent brand advertising campaign.

Trade show marketing usually entails a carefully crafted integration of numerous marketing activities, such as:

• Inviting current and potential customers to your trade show booth and events through direct mailings, e-mail blasts, trade magazine ad inserts, and website announcements

• Interacting with the trade press—maintaining relationships, providing company updates, and pitching stories—and also using the shows to maintain relationships with industry analysts and business partners

• Researching product innovations, potential partners, and competitors

• Scheduling sales calls and demo products to potential customers

• Timing new product announcements and press conferences to occur while the show is in session

• Timing any local cause-related marketing activities to occur during the show to gain publicity in local newspapers

• Paying to sponsor the show in return for many items of value to a brand building campaign, such as mailing lists, e-mail lists, a better booth floor position, workshop speaking slots, or having your logos plastered on trade show brochures, convention center banners, cybercafé computers, buses, and a myriad of other things

• Beefing up your advertising and editorial presence in that month’s issue of trade magazines

• Placing ads throughout the convention center, such as on hotel room key cards or televisions

Creative marketing may even include buying outdoor advertising along the route between the convention center and the convention center hotels. With all of these activities, however, remember that each trade show must have a simple and coherent set of messages. Also remember that trade shows are just one marketing tactic in a brand building campaign!

Effective Integrating Mechanisms

When integrating your brand marketing efforts, here are some mechanisms you may find useful:

• Create a well-communicated brand positioning statement that includes the target customer and the brand essence, promise, and personality.

• Conduct a workshop on brand positioning with the organization’s senior managers, if necessary, to build consensus.

• Place a brand marketing visionary at the top of at least the marketing organization (a marketing VP or chief marketing officer) or better yet (from a marketer’s perspective) at the top of the enterprise.

• Provide the chief marketing officer with as broad a span of control as possible (encompassing as many of the aforementioned disciplines as possible) and hold frequent forums to communicate marketing issues and initiatives with other senior leaders of the organization.

• Create a customer brand engagement/experience manager role.

• Set specific brand management and marketing objectives (long term and short term).

• Create a brand marketing plan.

• Integrate brand plans with the organization’s strategic plans.

• Establish product, program, and segment marketing plans (driven by, or at least congruent with, brand marketing plans).

• Develop marketing budgets allocated by market segment and subdiscipline (with 10 percent to 20 percent of the overall budget held by the chief marketing officer for unforeseen opportunities).

• Develop integrated media plans.

• Set up an intranet (or extranet) site devoted to brand identity standards and systems (and any other published brand information of use to broad audiences).

• Set up digital brand asset-management systems (to manage organizations with decentralized marketing control).

• Create a brand identity council comprised of brand management personnel, general managers, and creative directors from each of the organization’s divisions.

• Hold frequent marketing update meetings for heads of each of the marketing subdisciplines (for people to keep informed about what others are doing).

• Hold quarterly marketing planning sessions.

• Hold brand management forums or summits at least twice a year.

• Situate marketing people as close together as possible.

• Situate marketing people close to salespeople.

• Situate marketing people close to product development people.

• Situate marketing people close to customer service people.

• Provide monthly or quarterly updates on progress against marketing objectives.

• Broadly disseminate brand management and marketing monthly reports.

• Carefully script the sales force on the brand story.

• Send frequent marketing communications to the field sales force.

• Use as few advertising and other marketing agencies as possible. Some organizations will find that a single full-service advertising/marketing agency will help to integrate their marketing effort with a single brand voice and visual style. Others will find that it is best to use multiple agencies with best-in-class services in specific areas, such as brand advertising, collateral materials, direct mail, or public relations. Those that choose to do the latter put a greater burden on internal efforts to integrate brand marketing.

• Designate one internal copywriter and one internal graphic designer as keepers of the brand voice and visual style.

• Designate one brand management person as the ultimate enforcer of the brand identity standards. That person should be widely respected throughout the organization, possess outstanding interpersonal skills, and be very assertive.

• Train every marketer to always ask, “Have I reinforced the brand promise in this decision or activity?”

One other very important consideration is cross-channel integration, especially between online and offline points of brand contact. This type of integration is doubly important for retailers that maintain both online and offline stores. The customer’s experience needs to be seamless across these channels, requiring the systems to be totally integrated and designed to accommodate how customers are most likely to gather information and shop across those channels.

The smaller the organization (especially those with fewer than 150 employees), the easier it is to integrate marketing activities across the organization. The larger the organization, the more the integration will need to rely on formal processes and procedures.

Your marketing objectives will dictate the most advantageous mix of marketing and media tactics. For instance, if your primary objective is to build awareness, PR and advertising will be a larger part of your marketing plan. If your primary objective is to generate sales leads, then trade shows, seminars, events, online promotions, and direct marketing will comprise a large part of your marketing plan.

Use the checklist in Figure 13–1 to assess the efficacy of your brand management practices in the area covered by this chapter. The more questions to which you can answer “yes,” the better you are doing. The checklist also provides a brief summary of the material covered in the chapter.