IMC Breakdown – you’re all wrong.

If you’re a fan of Integrated Marketing Communications or if you do it for a living,  you’re probably as sick as I am of knowing that ALL marketing models have gone to hell since “the advent of social media” –   arguably the most abused phrase in marketing-related articles the pat 5-6 years.

It’s also likely that your inbox is clogged with tons of articles with “The top X [insert favorite social medium or topic]  tips every Marketer/CMO should know” . You probably get a chance to read maybe 20% of these articles and either share them with peers, clients, etc and bookmark the rest for future use on papers or presentations; if you’re a smarter user you just probably delete them. (I’m in the former category).

Another annoying kind of email is  “Get the biggest bang for your buck on [insert favorite social media or topic]”. In short, every day many people claim to have found the holy grail of consumer understanding and Marketing ROI.

Unless you’ve read the two articles on this post, you’re all wrong; dead wrong.

The Funnel is dead

I believe that the key to successful IMC is firstly to understand Consumer Decision – or lack thereof. Almost every model or approach to understanding consumers assumes that we (people) go from unawareness to purchase to loyalty in a linear fashion. This is the first big mistake.

The folks from McKinsey began to correct this error 4 years ago – 4 millennia in social media years)- with their model of the Consumer Decision Journey.

Click to view Interactive CDJ Model

This article includes interactive features and is a must-read for anyone in our profession -and this class. I hope it will spark a discussion that helps us model the elusive nature of consumer decision in each of our businesses or projects.

The second big deal with IMC is measuring Return on Marketing Investment or MROI. Many models attempt to measure how IMC initiatives (digital and traditional) impact sales. Thousands of marketing metrics have come along during the years: Some, in my humble opinion, provide some order and structure to IMC management, others just complicate things. I think measuring MROI, especially when digital/mobile is involved is as difficult as predicting the weather. We can have many, many models, but in the end all predictions, forecasts budgets and estimates are all very educated guesses.

Click to download PDF

This week, the people from Accenture published a  White Paper on MultiChannel Attribution that helps to non-linearly frame IMC, and measuring ROI while answering these questions :

• How did a particular sale happen?
• Who should get the credit for it?
• How much credit should be attributed to each consumer interaction across channels, and on what basis?
• How should the investment be apportioned across channels?

I don’t wish to imply that reading these two articles will make you right when designing your own IMC plan. All I expect from this is that you enjoy the reading and that you join me in being wrong so that at least we can all be the same kind of wrong.