From the course: Brand and Marketing Integration

Four types of integration

From the course: Brand and Marketing Integration

Start my 1-month free trial

Four types of integration

- Have you heard that a four-leaf clover can bring you good luck? And that each leaf represents something different so that all four leaves working together bring you that good luck? Well, it takes four types of integration, all working together to ensure your brand and marketing efforts are aligned and relevant to stakeholders. Stakeholders include customers and prospects, employees and new recruits, local communities in which your business operates or if you're a public company, the financial community. Let's define the four types of integration. Vertical integration is aligning your brand and marketing with your company's vision, mission or purpose and values. The specifics vary by company but most tend to state their primary goal or vision, reason for being or purpose and how they approach doing business, which is their values. These statements are the center, stabilizer and strength of a company but those words are just the starting point. These words rely on aligned brand and marketing strategies across the company to bring them to life, differentiate from competition and drive long-term growth. Take, for example, PepsiCo, a global company that markets 22 iconic brands, such as Pepsi, Quaker, Lipton and Tropicana in over 200 countries. As you see on their website, their whole way of doing business across all their brands aligns with their mission, vision and values. Horizontal integration is aligning the marketing organization's strategy, structure and capabilities. Let's say your marketing strategy is to be customer centric. Then your marketing organizational structure and capabilities need to align with that strategy. So in this example, you'd need to organize so the customer experience is the focal point, such as creating teams around each customer segment. Customer-centric capabilities would be required, such as properly trained customer service representatives or a website experience, designed with the customer in mind, including relevant information, or interactive tools they might need. External integration is aligning across external marketing communications touchpoints, such as advertising, social media, the website, direct mail or event marketing. One key way to accomplish this is through the customer decision journey, which provides the strategic foundation to integrate. A decision journey maps the customer's perspective as they progress through their decision process. This integrates efforts across the customer stages, touchpoints and messaging to create a seamless experience for external stakeholders. I cover this topic in dept in my course the Customer Decision Journey. Internal integration is aligning all internal communications within the company so the company's brand look and feel are consistent and employees know what to expect. This can include internal company announcements, emails, intranet sites, event marketing, social communities to exchange ideas, training portals and more. Employee participation is essential to integrate marking efforts. Employees must understand their role in integration and be provided with training so they have the capabilities and tools to integrate their efforts with other teams across the company. A successfully implemented marketing integration strategy improves the brand and customer experience and engages employees. A comprehensive approach, including vertical, horizontal, external and internal integration creates a solid, strategic foundation to align efforts across stakeholders.

Contents