Integrated Marketing – Exo’s Choice in 2002

To best understand today’s marketing, it may be helpful to take a brief look at history. The year is 1995 and the Web has just arrived, bringing with it a tidal wave of change for marketing. The close of the ‘90s and the beginning of new millennium were marked by the adoption of the Web into businesses and homes at lightning speed. The Web represented a new communication and distribution channel which upset modern marketing as we had known it, based on theories going back to the industrial revolution such as the 4 P’s of marketing and the “product” marketing approach (mass communication, mass distribution, and mass production).

We founded Exo in 2002 with two basic beliefs: that clients must always be listened to carefully (since marketing was invented to benefit sellers rather than buyers); and that this “New Marketing” could and should be integrated with traditional, or offline, marketing. When marketers separate online or Web marketing from their offline or traditional marketing, each approach loses some of its power. At the time, however, integrating the online and offline approaches was considered a new and avant-garde approach to marketing management. As the Internet took hold, the practice of marketing as a broad discipline had by then become divided into different silos. Marketers toiled in their respective silos without talking to each other. On the one hand, firms specializing in marketing research did their work, followed by marketing communications agencies or even Web shops. On the other hand, we had management consultants, sales people, and marketing specialists who did not care for each other.

Over the last 9 years, Exo has continued to refine its business model. It’s a model based on the integration of all the various marketing silos and one which specializes in serving B2B (business-to-business) enterprises, enabling them to pass through the turmoil and increasing pressures of the marketplace (hypercompetition, the shortening of product life cycles, etc.)

We are now more certain than ever of the validity of the concept behind Exo, the challenge of global integration – a challenge we have facing daily for over 9 years – proves that. And our certainty has been supported over the last several years by the industry gurus who proclaim that marketing must be integrated to be efficient.

“Today, adopting a more global strategy, one that permits the understanding of a wide range of consumer behaviour on a fixed term, has becoming a necessity.” This global approach, which has been christened the new integrated marketing, requires most leaders “to juggle between various electronic marketing techniques for best results.” 2

This comes as no surprise. But, from where we stand, stopping at this level of integration is not enough to perform effectively. Certainly, integrating across various channels is fundamental to an adequate marketing approach. But what’s equally true is that, without the further integration of the disciplines of strategic marketing and those related to marketing (sales and direct marketing, for example), including the integration of IT as well as the service marketing process3, the vision or approach will not be truly global.

The role of IT is basic to the practice of marketing. Sophisticated and powerful electronic tools make for optimal integration. Without those tools, integration is impossible. What’s more, IT tools that serve our practice measure an impressive number of performance indicators, paving the way for continuous improvement of strategies and tactics. Without IT, we would not live and interact in a globally connected world.

With the arrival of Social Media, another paradigm arose and created a new challenge for business: power has changed hands. That is to say that no matter what companies say about themselves, their products, and their services, their clients – if they feel cheated – can at any time destroy that work or at least exert direct and powerful influence on current or future customers of those companies.

Marketing is no longer defined solely from the point of view of companies: it is also defined from the point of view of the clients who choose to exercise the power they hold. And that is what’s truly important! For marketers, marketing is naturally integrated (with the levels of integration very uneven), but for clients, it is not. The latter now have greater ease of buying in all circumstances, and they have multiple means of interacting and exchanging ideas and opinions on a number of important platforms all found on the Web. Marketing professionals also use the term “consumer centric” or “customer driven” to describe the new way of addressing marketing and grasp the true nature of the beast – the new consumers who hold all the power.

In any case, and regardless of the term, we are talking about a new philosophy… a new emerging practice for the marketing industry.

Integrated marketing is not that simple to operate. It requires multidisciplinary expertise and the orchestration of a bold and strong agility to respond to rapidly changing markets. These are skills that can only be acquired after several years of continuous practice and monitoring of business intelligence.

Companies that practice integrated strategic marketing obtain the best results. One study conducted among 200 businesses in Britain demonstrated that those companies who practiced integrated strategic marketing increased their marketing performance by nearly 25% over the short-term. Integration added to marketing results over time, as it enabled ongoing overall improvement.

Here is a brief list of the general benefits of this approach:

• Budgets are optimized, because nearly everything is measurable thanks to tools such as CRM or website analytics, and therefore can be improved. We are talking about a continuous improvement process.
• It gives power to companies to react to dynamically growing market segments stimulated by the rise of technology. We can now address sub-segments with a great deal of precision, instead of viewing audiences as one giant homogenized mass. We become more precise in terms of targeting and positioning.
• It permits each channel, whether online or offline to perform at its best; we favour a more comprehensive benchmark: ultimately increased sales.
• The new integrated marketing creates strategic opportunities. It permits businesses to influence the behaviour of consumers all along the sales cycle and to add value to the lives of those clients.
• It allows future buying behaviour to be anticipated and facilitates “upselling” or “cross-selling,” as it permits better product portfolio management to create greater value advantages over the long term. And all of this is made possible through the different sales “platforms” put in front of customers.
• Customers feel like they are being listened to, and also feel as if their contributions are improving the products and services being offered to them. The result is the enhancement of the brand image through customer satisfaction.

Integrated marketing is the natural evolution and desired result of what we practice. It is in some sense one of the most useful engines for generating business wealth. It is also complex, as it is multidisciplinary on the one hand, and on the other it continues to evolve very rapidly with advances in IT and particularly the Web. Over the past fifteen years, modern marketing has no doubt gone through an accelerated evolution that exceeds its changes over the entire preceding century.

Lynda St-Arneault for Exo Integrated Marketing

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The term “modern” often means “current” or “contemporary.” According to Wikipedia: Modern marketing developed in the 1920s in the United States and in France in the 1950s. Advertising was the primary tool, indeed unique in marketing communications. Media planning techniques came into being in 1957, with the creation of of the Centre for the Study of Media Advertising which did the first study of audiences. The development of television and and its use for product brand advertising fueled explosive growth in the advertising industry. By the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, a new generation of marketing agencies had appeared.

2 Source: Accenture.com

3 The marketing process involves three major stages: strategic planning, the development of marketing tools, and market implementation.