Executive Editor Brad Berens sits down with the integrated marketing guru and learns how marketers should be striving for alignment rather than integration.
Editors note: Don Schultz will be a keynote speaker at December's iMedia Summit.
Brad Berens: I have the pleasure today of talking with the hardest working Emeritus Professor in academics, possibly across any discipline -- Don E. Schultz -- of the Medill School, Northwestern. And, today we are talking about the state of the nation for integrated marketing-- what it means, whether or not we have made any progress in the last year or two, and where we -- where Don, in particular -- thinks things might be going.
Our conversation today will cover:
Page 1: Two issues impacting marketing today
Page 2: Customer-centricity vs. a customer focus
Page 3: Alignment rather than integration
Page 4: What alignment looks like
Page 5: How to embrace alignment
So, let me ask you a first question on a topic that we chatted about earlier, Don. One distinction that is important to you is the distinction between push and pull. What does that mean?
Don Schultz: Well, the real issue that marketing, all marketing, struggles with today is that by and large all marketing organizations were designed to push things out. We made things; we pushed them out into the marketplace. We wanted to communicate with people; we pushed out advertising. We wanted to incent them in some way; we pushed out sales promotion. So, marketing essentially, has been a linear process, starting with the marketer pushing it out into the marketplace.
So, the problem marketers have today is they have absolutely no way to deal with the pull of marketplace. They simply cannot get their head around the fact that people now have access to unlimited amounts of information. They have access to unlimited numbers of products. They can time shift. They can do almost anything; and, it destroys the linear model that the marketers have built up over the last hundred years.
And so, it is the struggle between this push and pull. Now, if you go back and look at, and think about, the dotcom move, or bust, whichever you want to call it, back in the late '90s, the whole idea was that the pull marketplace was going to totally destroy the push. It was going to wipe out bricks and mortar; it was going to take care of everything-- everybody would be sitting at home, locked into their computer screen, never coming out and consuming brands willy-nilly.
The problem is that when the dotcom boom came to a halt, in essence, the marketing organizations said, "Well, that is it. They are never going to get anywhere. They are never going to be able to accomplish anything, and therefore, we do not have to worry about that anymore."
Berens: Right. So, there was a rejection of the platform and the media, rather than the somewhat dubious executions on the earlier technology.
Schultz: Well, again, I think what traditional marketing organizations said was, "Well, we told you it would not work. It never did. It never has. Nobody ever made any money online," and all that sort of thing. And, as a result, just put their blinders on and said, "Okay, let's just proceed with what we can do." And, that is really what is happening.
Berens: Do you think that attitudes are changing now?
Schultz: I do not think attitudes are changing; I think the behaviors are changing. The behaviors of the consumer are changing the beliefs of the marketing organizations-- not that they want to believe it, but they have to believe it. This is the real struggle that you find.
Another problem is that, back when the internet first became commercial, and we started looking at and having access to electronic communications and electronic systems, marketing organizations essentially said, "We will put the online people, and the electronic people, over in the corner," and then ignored them. Then, they decided to put them in another room; and then, they decided to put them in another building; and then they decided to put them in a whole different city, because they did not want them to contaminate the traditional marketers.
Berens: Right. If they could put them on the moon that would probably be the best possible solution for a lot of traditional folks.
Schultz: Exactly. Space was essentially what they were looking for. But, what really happened is, when they did that, they separated the systems inside the marketing organization. And now, they are beginning to realize that they need to bring them back together, and they do not have any way to do it. They cannot simply think their way through, and they do not have the organizational structures to bring them back together.
The big struggle most of them have is, "How do I start? I recognize now that I have to have traditional media. I recognize I need to have electronic media. How do I bring that together inside my organization, because I have spent the last fifteen years trying to keep them separated and trying to keep them apart." So, that creates another bucket of problems. So, it is the push/pull, and the growth of the consumer power. It is the organizational structures that are in place that companies have great difficulty dealing with.