7 Points of Marketing Integration

Where should we really pay attention?

In the marketing world, there appear to be seven areas of integration that often get less attention than they deserve.  

1. Physical with Digital: as long as we can touch, smell and walk around it will be an experiential world.   Neither traditional marketing nor digital marketing will win out; it will be the combination of the two where one reinforces the other.
2. Services with Products: most brands today are a combination of intangible and tangible offerings serviced by different parts of an organization; but consumers don't see org charts they simply want a solution to their needs. 
3. Our Brands with their Journey: unless you adhere to the principles of direct response, "but wait there's more", then the journey is not going to be about a single brand.  We need to focus on understanding the decision making process in order to facilitate choice.
4. Identifiable with Anonymous: consumers exist in both worlds simultaneously since they may provide permission at one touch point and simply browse at another as they surf the landscape.  We must respect those decisions while trying to improve the experience.
5. Creative with Execution: the ability to assemble assets in real time based on the context of an interaction implies that we need to be able to optimize creative and substantiate the claim "we know how content works".
6. Analysis with Planning: feedback loops are the foundation of analysis; the question shouldn't be "did we get what we paid for?" (reporting) but rather "why are the results different?" and "what should we try next?"
7. Campaigns with Results: too often the metrics are simply what we can measure with the data at hand, not what we need to measure to better understand the future value of a relationship.

Time to think of new use cases....