Schultz: Another problem that organizations have is that if you look at a marketing organization, it is all facing outward. The problem today is the consumer, the customer, the person who is using the electronic media, is using the pull system, and never goes to the marketing group. They go around the marketing group. They go to websites, they go to MySpace, they go to online groups, they go to blogs. They go to all those things, most of which the marketing organization has nothing to do with.
Their problem is the experiences that customers have are in most cases not determined by the marketing organization. Customer service does not report to marketing-- it is not part of the marketing group organization. Supply systems are not related to the marketing organization. Employees do not report to the marketing organization. So, as a result, all the brand contacts and all the experience you have with a company is not under the direction, or even under the control of, the marketing group.
Berens: Well, direction and control are one thing, and I understand that many corporations are not marketing focused; but, I think that, in some ways, thinking about direction and control, it might be unrealistically ambitious. Something more possibly achievable would be simply for the marketing group in a big brand to know what was going on.
Schultz: Well, that would be helpful. But, remember, they do not have any way to communicate internally, because all of their communication is all designed to go outbound. It is all designed to talk to the retailer, to talk to the consumer-- never to tell the people inside what is going on.
Berens: Fair enough. So, forward facing is something you mentioned a moment ago, I think.
Schultz: What all of that says is, if you are talking about integrated marketing communication, when marketing was dominant in the marketplace (back in the late '80s and early '90s, when we first started all of this stuff), marketing controlled all of those systems; marketing controlled all of the communication that was pouring out. Well integrated marketing communication, at that point, simply meant, how do I get all of these things to look alike? How do I get the same sound, the same color, the same logo -- all of those things -- on all the outbound stuff? That is what I am concerned about. To that end, integration is difficult, and really what we ought to be talking about is alignment, because you cannot integrate the organization. You can only align it, because of the silos, and the organizational structures that are in place.
So, really, when we talk about, "How do you start to think about integration and alignment?" what we start to think about is: How do I put in horizontal systems inside the organization that will bring all those functional silos together, so that they are all focused on trying to serve and provide what the customers want and the customers need?
Berens: Can you tease out this difference between integration and alignment a little bit more, because I am groping towards an understanding of it, but I think you probably have a way of explaining it that I would get more quickly?
Schultz: Integration was, "How do we get one site, one sound, one color, one logo-- all of the stuff that we are sending out." That was integration. That was all in the control, really, of the marketing group, of the marketing organization. So, the marketing organization wrote and controlled the advertising, the promotion, most of the other things, and the way the organization brought its face to the marketplace.
When we gave the consumer technology, it allowed them to bypass the marketing organizations. In fact, they do not need to listen to marketing communication anymore. In essence, what I am working on now is a concept called: placeholders. Placeholders, essentially, are things that organizations establish in the mind of the consumer, and in the marketplace, so that when someone says, "I need to do that," they think of me, and they at least go in and they Google me.
Berens: How is a placeholder different than a brand?
Schultz: Placeholders could be categories, brands have to do with products. So, what I may be talking about is, if I have a particular need that can be solved in any number of ways… for example, I am looking for entertainment. Well, entertainment can be music, it can be theater, it can be dance, it can be socializing, it can be any number of things…
Berens: I see, so category participation is…
Schultz: It is participation… and, it is essentially the social networks we are talking about. But brands are tied to specific products, or specific solutions. What organizations have to do, going forward, is to create themselves as a placeholder in the mind of the consumer. If I am looking for entertainment, "Well, gee, maybe I ought to go look at Sony. Maybe I ought to go look at NBC. Maybe I ought to go look at Rock and Roll bands." Those are the kinds of things we are dealing with, because today the consumer in essence does not really need to hear anything from the marketing organizations. All they need to know is a placeholder, so I can go tap into the internet and download anything I want in two tenths of a second. That is the big change.
Next: What alignment looks like
