Bindu Gaire Sharma

20328

The review of “Is Your Integrated Marketing Campaign Truly Integrated?”, Joel
Quadracci (Feb.14 2019), Harvard Business Review

From the essay, the author, Q. Joel, presented an idea of integrated marketing and how the phrase
that was referred to unifying various marketing methods and tactics such as direct marketing and
advertising to serve one strategy has now been used to describe different online and offline
channels working together to create a seamless consumer experience. In today’s scenario the
common definition of “integrated marketing” no longer works. Today, integrated marketing must
involve not just about integrating your own messages and communications, but integrating
your customer more directly into the marketing, sales, and service processes themselves. It is
notable that the author gave three examples on how they make the marketing integrated, which
were based on arts and crafts retailer, consumer packaged Foods Company and national outdoor
retailer. Only if companies use data-driven consumer insights, digital channels coordinated with
offline channels, consistent content and creative strategy paired with execution the marketing
will really be integrated, and the results will be effective. So, we can conclude from the article
that you can’t create a seamless consumer experience if your marketing process isn’t integrated.
At the same time, the author also gave some data examples in the article to confirm that the true
integration of marketing campaigns is one that brings together multiple channels linked with
media neutrality, consumer centricity based on extensive data driven customer insight, co-
ordination and consistency across the customer experience and the involvement across all
business departments at a strategic level to create the greatest benefits for any company.

The author's stance is very clear; supporting that true integration of market resources can
maximize the benefits for companies. The author starts by raising a question at the beginning of
the article, whether a true integration of resources exists or not, and then answers that the
integration has not happened in a way it should be. He further mentions that in today’s disruptive
marketing landscape, disparate teams with differing points of view and separate budgets and
KPIs make typical way of planning and executing marketing campaigns dis-integrated. The
language used by the author in this article is very objective and I personally feel that there is no
bias. Moreover, the expression of the author’s point of view is very clear and the examples are
appropriate. He has presented three examples to prove that managing and analyzing customer
data and using insights from user data to develop media plans or marketing campaigns,
managing the supply chain and integrating the market resources, one can make real
implementation of integrated marketing.

In conclusion, I also agree that integrated marketing deserves a different look and is more
important than ever. The true integrated marketing view is not just about campaigns, channels
and tactics. It is more of a people first view. The customer insights, data, tactics, online and
offline, media, advertising, direct, data-driven: it’s all connected around the brand story,
relevance and the customer. In modern days, the ever blurring the lines between “digital” and
“physical” blur in how consumers think. So, creating a seamless marketing supply chain for
seamless consumer experience is even more important than before.