What alignment looks like

Berens: When we talk about integrated marketing here, at iMedia, a lot of the time we are talking about the more aesthetic kind of integration, where you want to market the same product in multiple channels. It is a little different than just making sure that the tagline is the same: in your email, on your website, in your radio spot, on your billboard. The big thing that has been interesting to me is the idea that you do not ever know who is going to be exposed to what. 

And so, a lot of TV spots right now (and, we just had a piece in iMedia Connection last week about integrating online and television), a lot of TV spots are having pervasive URLs throughout the entire spot, or you know, "for more, visit blankety-blank dotcom." On the one hand that is a way of giving people a place to go to get more information that the marketers either do control or at least have a voice in. On the other hand, if you are leaving some important part of the message to the other channel; if you are saying that in order to get the full story you have to go to the website after the commercial, then you are just giving people an opportunity to drop off before they get the whole message. So, it seems a formidable challenge to figure out how to market through different channels, when you never have a real sense of sequence. Do you know who is doing it right? In your experience, who is doing a good job of all this?

Schultz: Well, they are so limited, and I am not really sure that there are very many companies that are doing it right. I keep coming back to the idea that, what iPod has done, which is created a new category. And, it is not as much the iPod product itself, it is all the ancillary things that go with it. What organizations have to think about, because Apple -- yes, Apple sells iPods -- but, Apple is not participating in all those ancillary products that go along with iPods.

Berens: You mean podcasts? Or, do you mean other devices into which you stick your iPod?

Schultz: Yeah, podcasts, other devices, all those sorts of things. One of the things that happens is we are so accustomed to marketing and thinking about individual products, we do not think very much about the surrounding activities, and the surrounding elements that go with it. One of the things that marketing tends to do is to be specific to products. It tends to product promote rather than thinking about, "How can I use a product to build this whole support system that goes along with it?"

Berens: Well, one good example that I saw recently -- I was on vacation in Portland, Oregon, and went into NIKETOWN, because I wanted to buy some new running shoes. I had not been in a NIKETOWN for a while, and so I was somewhat surprised to see an entire line of iPod products. They have clothing for running where your iPod can slip into the sleeve. They have a neat little gizmo where you can put it into the bottom of your shoe, and it will talk to your iPod and measure your stride, and measure your running performance. And, this is….

Schultz: And, does Apple make it?

Berens: Apple and Sony seem to make these things together. There are ways in which the brands are leveraging each other, so that the iPod lifestyle and the outdoor Nike running lifestyle (which, I think people already see as overlapping), well now the products are using each other to promote each other. That is a kind of integration, but, that is not what I would usually think about as integration. I would ordinarily think of integration as what Apple is doing, and what Nike is doing individually. So… is that integration?

Schultz: When you talk about integration, what you are talking about is holistic-- and there is only one element. So, in that case, one of them has to disappear, either Apple has to disappear, or iPod has to disappear; and, that would be integration. Then, you have integrated the two, and maybe you have created another name. But, in essence, you are only talking about one single element with integration. When you talk about alignment-- that is what you are talking about. How do Nike and Apple align together to operate it in the marketplace? So, it is not subsuming, and it is not overcoming, and it is not somebody disappearing-- that is the big difference. So integration got a really bad name, because nobody really wants to be integrated.

Berens: Because they think that integration means the erasure of one component…

Schultz: Exactly-- I do not want to be integrated into anything. I want to keep my own persona, and I want to keep my own element, I want to keep my own activities; I want to keep my own projects…

Berens: My own budget….

Schultz: But, I do not mind being aligned. I can align myself inside the organization. It goes back to the real issue, and that is that marketing (unfortunately, in too many places) is a department for a functional activity. And, in truth, marketing is what an organization does, not what a group of people do, because you cannot go to market with products and services unless you get the organization aligned behind them, because you need operations, you need marketing, you need finance, you need HR, you need people, you need all of those things to be successful. The question is, how do you align the organization to do that? And, how do you align with customers, not how do you subsume one into another?

Berens: It also sounds so much more achievable. Integration, to my mind, is a lot like engagement-- it is one of those terms that is very hard to define. And, the fact that we have been batting this around for you know, 25 minutes or so, kind of supports that… that you go to any two different marketers or advertisers, and you talk about integration, you probably are going to get two different definitions. They may be only slightly different.…

Schultz: You will get one from each of them, and then one on which they do not agree either. It is a big problem.

Next: How to embrace alignment