Wise words, but not rocket science. In fact you might say it’s so obvious, it’s stopped being of interest. Companies are more concerned with keeping up with the possibilities of technology than ensuring they’re adhering to the basic rules.

More touchpoints

Customers can now touch your brand through more media than every before, so keeping your brand and your marking consistent is far more complicated than it used to be. With press, TV, radio, DM, inserts, the internet, emails, SMS messages, posters, podcasts and heaven knows what else to contend with, it’s not surprising that messaging gets a little out of sync.

But before we look at integrating marketing activities, we should remember that there’s an even more fundamental type of integration: the integration of your proposition with the needs of your target audience.

Connect with customers

No matter how integrated your messaging or consistent your marketing, your offer and your proposition have to make a connection with the needs of your target audience. When competitive products are essentially the same, and practically impossible to tell apart, the winner will always be the one who connects better with the prospect. In B2B marketing this has never been so important. We’ve got to engage with our audience.

…And you can’t engage with your audience properly unless you’ve done your homework. At the most basic level this boils down to something as simple as recognising whether they’re a customer or a prospect and tailoring your offer and message accordingly. Amazingly not everyone appears to have the ability or even the desire to do this. We recently had a mailing from Demon about some new service which completely ignored the fact that we’re already a customer. All I learned from the mailing they sent me was that they didn’t know who their customers were. Oh Demon, oh dear.

Don’t go too far

However, care should be taken not to take things too far and in B2B marketing it can be awfully tempting to segment your audience into too many bits. I put that down to the business world’s obsession with titles. The top finance bod at five different companies may be called five different things and that can cause havoc when you’re trying to segment by occupation. And don’t try to create separate propositions for, say, Financial Directors and Assistant Financial Directors. You’ll tie yourself in knots and your headlines will collapse under the weight of their own specificity.

Tactics for personalisation

The best personalisation is invisible. Know your audience properly and you’ll have no need for the kind of digital printing that let’s you print your customer’s name as though written on a condensed mirror. It’s clever, but it’s trying too hard. It’s just a modern variation of the technique Reader’s Digest was using in the last century. If you send the right message to the right person at the right time, you don’t even have to know their name. An anonymous scrap of paper under a windscreen wiper saying “You’ve got a flat tyre” does the job beautifully.

When it comes to integrating your marketing activities, the fundamental question to ask is “at what point does it all become one?” If it all looks different, yet every element is true to the company founder’s vision, is it integrated? If activities fly off in a myriad different directions, but all look identical, is that integrated? From a creative point of view, my money goes on the former, since the integration is at a strategic level and that gives you practically unlimited creative freedom. Your average brand policeman would go for the latter, since visual consistency is the easiest to control – and for most people, that’s all that matters.

Honda case study

For example. Honda. Hate Something, Choir and The Impossible Dream are without doubt clever, beautiful and original. Wieden and Kennedy are being showered with awards. The industry is a-buzz with it all. The ads all look very different, yet it’s all underpinned by a single thought - The Power of Dreams. (One aside here. Marketers may love all this stuff, but what about the real world? I’ve spoken to several non-marketing people about the Choir ad who said “…but it wouldn’t make me buy a Civic.”)

Nevertheless, whether you go for strategic or visual integration, does it work? I once worked for a financial services company marketing their ISAs. A mammoth proportion of their budget went on media and we spent weeks writing, designing and revising the creative to the nth degree. Should the headline be tweaked? Should a key feature be replaced with something more compelling? Should the roundel on the poster be slightly smaller?

Yet when it came to the fulfilment, it was practically an afterthought. The client had some envelopes left over from the previous year’s campaign. The product brochures were generic, visually unconnected to the campaign. It was felt that it wasn’t worth “designing” the Terms and Conditions leaflet. We’d worked so hard enticing a few precious customers to respond and we rewarded them with a mish-mash of paper all shoved into a C4. Integrated? Visually no, but the strategic link was there. As an agency we all got very uptight about how our creative was being mistreated. But. Big but. Did it matter? Did the would-be investors care? Did it make a difference to the conversion rate? Of course, we never found out.

Sun Microsystems case study

Last year, we ran a campaign for Sun Microsystems called 10aroundtown to support their new Solaris 10 operating system. Sun wanted to reclaim their reputation as an innovator and so the campaign was centred around a sculpture competition run in conjunction with the Royal College of Art. The winning sculptures, each of which represented one of the key benefits of Solaris 10 and incorporated a three-dimensional “10”, were exhibited at several locations in London.

Bowler-hatted City Gents handed out postcards. We ran online and offline advertising and everything. Gobos lit up buildings. Visually, there were differences between the executions but everything was based on the 10 key benefits of the product and everything steered people to the all-important website. Strategically, it was seamless – and very successful (oh and it won best integrated campaign for 2005 at November’s B2B awards!)

Integration should mean nothing more than delivering on the promises you make and this brings us back to Wally Olins’ point. For example, no matter how pretty and beguiling BT’s broadband ads are, an automated “helpline” that cuts you off, sends you down cul-de-sacs and tells you to ring a string of other numbers fatally undermines what they’re trying to achieve. Worse still, it makes the customer feel like a complete sap for signing up.

By Drew Nicholson,
DNX Marketing