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OVERCOMING BARRIERS WITH

IGMC SOLUTIONS

Sunarto Prayitno

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Introduction In this lesson we describe and identity the barriers that

could prevent the development of the IGMC approach we have been describing.

This barriers cannot be site-stepped, minimized, or dismissed as inconsequential for they real.

They can, however, be overcome by new ways of thinking, acting, and managing organizations and communication groups in the 21th century.

Thus, in the following section, we have sought to accentuate the positive.

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IntroductionOvercoming Barriers with IGMC Solutions:

1. The Transitioning Metaphor2. From Marketplace to Market-space

3. Organizational Constrains4. A Research-Poor Consumer Environment

5. Corporate/Marketing Brand Interface6. The Training Investment

7. Mid Maps: Strategy and Creativity8. The Agency Interactive Perspective

9. Investment and Measurement

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The Transitioning Metaphor As we known that the world of business transitioning from

domestically focused economies to a world that is global in scope and activities.

Whether this can be described as a “brave new world” is debatable, but it is a world that requires new development paths for marketers at all organization levels.

So many of the firms we have interviewed, consulted for, or questioned are still positioned in the very first stage of IMC development – the one-sight, one-sound tactical approaches.

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The Transitioning Metaphor Admittedly, this is a good starting point. But it is an indictment

of the marketing profession, which has trumpeted customer orientation for at least forty years, that so many communications programs are still developed from an-inside-out rather than an outside-in viewpoint.

Managers and executives also have to transition in the ways the plan and operationalize marketing and corporate communication activities to achieve sustainable exchanges and relationships at a profit.

Can manages make this transitional changes? The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. But the positive reply is dependent on absorbing lessons from the new paradigm.

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The Transitioning Metaphor The question my arise that IGMC is such a powerful and

provocative process, why doesn’t every corporation, marketing communication agency, corporate communication department and public relations agency, and business school simply bow to the new received wisdom?

It is difficult for cultures to transition to accepting a new paradigm, process, or system as legitimate, particularly when the old models and processes are still in operation and in many cases still producing successful results.

Organizational heritage cannot be overtaken easily, and new ideas may percolate slowly.

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From Marketplace to Marketspace Worldwide demand for and acceptance of

products or brands are underpinned by consonance with cultural norms and values.

Today, cultural factors are still as important, if not more so, and the drive for an IGMC strategy implies tactical adaptation as necessary.

IGMC is as much about branding as it is about consumers. And consumers, their needs and wants, stand at the heart of brand loyalty.

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From Marketplace to Marketspace This suggests that all marketing communication

tools have to be focused on the consumer or consumer as the central hub, around with exchanges take place – note just advertising, but also sales promotion, direct marketing, point-of-sale, personal selling, package design, poster sites, the internet.

All fit into the new marketspace where consumers control what marketing communication messages they access and response to.

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Organizational Constraints Firm will not rush lemming-like over the cliff of look-

alike, sound alike communication programs.

Nor will they crowd to stumble upward through the staired stages toward financial and strategic integration.

Instead some corporations may already be well advanced in all four stages; others may be at stage 1 (tactical integration); still others may be considering adopting an outside-in as opposed to an inside-out perspective.

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Organizational ConstraintsAdaptation versus Standardization: The old issue of adaptation versus standardization keeps

cropping up. While commentators on either side of this debate keep up their respective ends, the only lucid approach is for communication to standardize where possible in relation to clearly defined market and adapt where necessary.

In fact focus on different customer groups necessitates differentiation in communication.

Loyals do not need or require the same type of communication as switchers, and both do not need the same type of communication as potentials.

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Organizational ConstraintsInternal Organizational Structure: At a recent global marketing conference someone

asked, “What is the greatest challenge to creating a global marketing and communication program?”

The answer: “Organizational structure.” The reason for this is that many “global firms” are in fact not global at all but simply multi-domestic.

That is, they have simple replicated the domestic structure from the home country and created in effect semiautonomous strategic business units.

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Organizational Constraints This functionally oriented, vertically integrated, geographically

focused organizational structures are simple to inflexible to deal with IGMC or marketing communication programs that work across many cultures with customers in mind.

The solution is to redesign organizational structures around customers and customer groups, not products, or strategic business units.

Just as much as organizations need to refocus and integrate marketing and corporate communication activities on key customer groups, the organization needs to think along the following lines:

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Organizational Constraints Stage 1: Start with customers and aggregate them

into groups that are similar in behavior, attitude, needs, and wants.

Stage 2: Make someone responsible for the welfare of that group of customers.

Stage 3: The managerial tasks becomes to manage income flows for that group, not products, units, or geographic.

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Organizational Constraints Managing such customer groups requires four capabilities,

each of which needs support from manufacturing, logistics, systems, finance, and accounting.

Undoubtedly, changing to such a customer-focused organization creates significant challenges for marketing management, at both the corporate and brand level.

How ever, we are concerned not just with promotional elements but with developing, maintaining, and increasing income flows from customers groups as well.

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Organizational Constraints Throughout, we have emphasized the strategic

role of IGMC, not just tactical juxtaposition, even though we recognize and applaud organizations that are moving through the stages.

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A Research-Poor Consumer Environment We have noted that many corporations are starting to pay

attention to cultural differences that correspond to what we have termed glocalization that ties into the IGMC process.

Even here, however, the process of IGMC is not driven entirely by customer needs but more by organizational edict.

We believe that firm need to access more and better information concerning the different customers groups they seek to serve. Business of all types need to build and derive information from the databases that capture behavioral and attitudinal information.

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A Research-Poor Consumer Environment To develop IGMC, firms need strategies that work.

Such strategies can indeed be driven by organizational criteria, but there is also the necessity for firms to recognize and appeal to homogeneous segments among heterogeneous global markets.

Likewise, recognizing homogeneity (along some variables) does not equate to similarity of decoding by consumers to similar global messages.

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A Research-Poor Consumer Environment The recent past has shown that many multidomestic

or global firms are keen to capitalize on new marketing communication developments.

The difficulty continues to be that about 95% of all media is still negotiated and placed locally, and the majority of media available to marketing communications in the international sphere is national or at best regional.

With exceptions there are still relatively few genuinely international media.

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A Research-Poor Consumer Environment Despite the numbers and depth of range of media

research vehicles across Europe and Asia, for example, very few media purchases are underpinned by sound understanding of the market or customer dynamics.

Far too many multinational media buys are driven by statistics, and statistics do not necessarily equate to understanding.

These statistical reports and surveys do, however, currently underpin many marketing communication strategies and are indeed useful at identifying broad macroeconomic trends.

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A Research-Poor Consumer Environment But the broad trends are not really a substitute for

behavioral and attitudinal evidence gathered from real exchanges and qualitative research data.

However, purely numerical evaluations will never be enough to ensure development of truly international/global campaigns.

What is needed, is to focus on customers and the ways in which they come into contact with brands or corporation and then to manage these contact points.

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A Research-Poor Consumer Environment At best, quantitative overviews of market factors

are useful but no more than a supplementary resource to the database material that is required for IGMC.

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Corporate or Marketing Brand Interface While we agree that communication is marketing and

marketing is communication, we are convinced that two types of communication are required in a world where corporate business news.

Just as consumers buy, consume, and derive satisfaction from brands, they also subscribe to information networks that report on organizational developments.

Who or what a corporation is, how it behaves, its image, and its persona are crucial to the various publics with which it interfaces and that allow to continue to operate in today’s world.

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Corporate or Marketing Brand Interface Corporations must take very seriously the need to build

relationships with publics – internal staff, business analysts, capital markets, the press and other forms of media, the communities in which they operate, and the markets they serve.

Areas such as social responsibility, community involvement, issues management, lobbying, and corporate advertising are very real support mechanism for every business and have to be managed just as rigorously, and as proactively, as the management of IGMC with customers. The corporation should be marketed as a brand in its own right.

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Corporate or Marketing Brand Interface The identity programs developed by management should bear

correspondence to the images before publics involved with and interested in corporate activities.

The corporate brand has to be seen as the central core or hub that gives an overall sense of identity, meaning, strategic overview, and dynamic thrust to individual brands within the corporate portfolio.

We have discovered in many corporations that the corporate and marketing communication function are separate. Both communication functions, however, can and do learn from each other and should ally with each other so the values and identity associated with brands and corporation become interrelated and synergistic.

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The Training Investment Corporations need invest not only in developing the relevant

infrastructure but also in developing the communication staff who are to move forward with the IGMC approach.

However, we suspect that businesses that will note change unless made to do so by market forces – falling sales, declining customer retention, reduced profits, loss of market share.

These factor my be the hard evidence that the models, tools, techniques, and processes that worked before do not work so well in the new information intensive, globally oriented, choice-proliferating market of the 21st century.

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The Training Investment New competencies will not be developed overnight or

even rapidly. Instead knowledge will be gained in the usual school of hard knocks, by developing brands, battling against competitors, communicating with publics and customers throughout the world.

But training can also be developed by studying and applying the latest information. The greatest informational interface lies between world-class business schools, leading-edge corporations, leading business executives, and top-notch research journals. Every leader in tomorrow’s business needs access to these material.

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The Training Investment But training costs money.

It is not just a matter of allocating resources; it is a matter of investment in the people who will build and maintain brands and business in the future.

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Mind Map: Strategy and Creativity We use the term mind maps as a metaphor for the

ways in which managers and executives view the world.

A simple analogy will suffice. Let’s suppose that we are visiting a new locality in some part of the world. Let’s also suppose that the map we have is out of date and does not provide up-to-date information that enables us to progress easily to our destination.

Sometimes people unwittingly operate from out-of-date maps. The problem with such maps is that they influence perception.

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Mind Map: Strategy and Creativity Perception is not necessarily about reality but

what we perceive reality to be.

This can act as a significant barrier to the many new ideas, concepts, and processes of what IGMC is and why it is necessary in today’s world.

The first part of the mind map we wish to redraw is to create for all managers and executives a customer-driven mode thinking. The second part of perception that needs changing is creativity.

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The Agency Interactive Perspective Strictly speaking change, in and of self, is not a

barrier to adoption of IGMC processes. The 21st century is about non stop change. The world we live in now would be scarcely recognizable to someone from 1900.

The 1990s alone saw changes in technology and marketing communication that have simply revolutionized the marketing world.

The age of the mass market, on which so many marketing models were based, is rapidly declining in most developed markets.

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The Agency Interactive Perspective The age of the micro, niche, and even unitary

market is now upon as. In these new markets communication control is in the hands of customers and consumers.

Change, meanwhile, continues at an accelerated pace. Even as we write, the marketing communication experience curve is moving on.

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The Agency Interactive Perspective There are those organizations that can assist in the

process of managerial learning that need to take place to implement IGMC. We know this process has to be client led, client driven.

Nonetheless we believe that significant strides have been made by marketing communication agencies.

Some have restructured to mirror client corporate requirements. These agencies are now in a position to move beyond the role of tactical marketing communication implementers or media buyers to being full strategic partners.

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The Agency Interactive Perspective Most successful IGMC implementation comes about

when clients and agencies work hand in hand to develop, implement, and evaluate integrated campaign.

Moreover, such agencies are an important disseminator of workable practice.

For the near or immediate future there may be no way around working with these “strategic partners.” But agency practitioners should not be too tied to one marketing communication mechanism or discipline. Rather they should consider client needs from a customer perspective.

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Investments and Measurement The main problem encountered in terms of the

continued development of IMC (rather than IGMC) was the failure to provide a set of methods and procedures to determine how much to invest in which customer groups, plus the added inability to measure outcomes from each set of investments in a robust manner.

Managers and executives in our study groups and empirical investigations of IMC recounted this barrier to the continued and accelerated diffusion of IMC.

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Investments and Measurement In this lesson we have provided a straightforward

spreadsheet-based approach to measuring return on customers investments.

We admit that there are some anomalies overlapping between brand building and business building investment and measurement and will continue to work on these for the future.

However, the planning and evaluation processes, once implemented by organizations, should rapidly lead to case materials; that is were the organizations that have learned via marketplace realities are willing to share the outcomes of IGMC or IMC in practice.