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Integrated Marketing ~ A viable
option
In today's world when there is a trend towards old wine
in a new bottle thinking many a people don't take
integrated marketing seriously. They simply consider it
to bet yet another fad, here today gone tomorrow.
However, this is not the case. In fact, integrated
marketing is an amalgamation of all the marketing roles,
resources and responsibilities catering to all kinds of
customers. These customers could be present or future,
internal or external. The function of integrated
marketing is to attract the customers through marketing,
promotional and customer service activities. It is due
to the far-reaching approach of integrated marketing that
many companies consider it to be the smart option.
There are various models of marketing followed by
different companies. Some companies have separate
departments for advertising, public relations, marketing
and sales, this is a very old model, where energies of
different departments work at separate levels and may not
be using all the resources to their optimum. Another
model is where your company has decentralized marketing
activities, and each department handles its own marketing
activities. In such a model the company is at a
disadvantage because each department handling its own
marketing means that certain costs and expenses are being
repeated and incurred twice or thrice by different
departments. The economies do not work well in this kind
of model.
Integrated marketing works best when all departments work
jointly towards a common aim. In such a scenario, you can
be sure of success in achieving all your targets, be it
business or marketing ones. It is very important to focus
all your marketing energies and resources in one
direction otherwise, you can be sure you have wasted
them. Be very careful that your unit works well
cohesively or your brand identity may get adversely
affected.
Also, it is important that all your marketing
requirements should be undertaken by one single cohesive
department. This department should be in the able hands
of marketing professionals. Everyone should do the job
that they are trained for accountants and IT people
should not be involved in marketing and should be looking
after only their respective fields of work. This way you
can be sure that your marketing is being done well.
Motivated, supervised and championed by the right kind of
people. This also allows you to check and evaluate the
progress that is being made in a single place giving you
a clear picture. If you have separate departments then it
becomes difficult to judge the exact position of your
marketing strategy.
Integrated marketing helps the company to project a
unified message and image of the company, and help to
keep a strong brand image. Different divisions handling
there own marketing activities will lead to sales people
giving out a different a marketing message and the
corporate department giving out another message. This
kind of a chaos will lead to scattered effort, unclear
messages and ultimately ineffective marketing campaigns.
If this kind of situation is there in your company then
you need to take corrective steps now - integrate the
marketing activities of your company as soon as possible.
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