The quest for the modern advertiser's
Holy Grail
Holistic marketing allows companies to reach customers in new ways.Gary Silverman At big corporations, marketing departments are pursuing a new Holy Grail. It is called “holistic marketing” a phrase that expresses the growing desire of companies to use a greater variety of means to communicate with their customers.
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The push into holistic marketing reflects two basic factors. Companies are losing confidence in the main weapon in their advertising arsenal the television commercial and they are growing intrigued by the internet and other alternatives.
But there is one big problem with the new holistic marketing regime there is really no such thing as a holistic marketing budget. Moreover, it could take years for companies to adopt the refined measurement systems and flexible bureaucratic processes that would be needed to make holistic marketing a reality rather than an ideal.
“I am not sure that companies have really come to grips with it,” says Barry Herstein, a senior vice-president who is heading the effort to integrate international communications at American Express, the US financial services giant.
Of course, marketing has never been simple. Companies traditionally divide their efforts into what is called above-the-line advertising, such as television, and below-the-line activities, such as direct mail.
But marketing is growing more complex because of technological advances that are giving consumers the power to avoid advertising. Digital video recorders are enabling people to fast-forward past television commercials, while software helps them block internet pop-up advertisements and unwanted e-mails.
The industry response has taken two basic forms. Marketers are looking for new places to put advertisements ranging from displays above men's urinals to the screens on mobile telephones and they are beginning to treat any contact with a consumer as a marketing opportunity.
The idea is to engage the customer wherever the customer happens to be a holistic approach, in other words. As a result, advertising agencies are not only thinking about television commercials these days. They are trying to figure out how companies should answer the telephone when consumers call to seek information or register a complaint. They are seeking to make the shopping experience more interesting, bringing a new verve and additional scientific firepower to product packaging and store display.
Website design is emerging as a particularly powerful weapon for marketers. To forge closer relationships with customers and get permission to send them e-mail solicitations companies are looking to create irresistible internet sites offering information on everything from how to apply eye make-up to how to volunteer for a clinical trial of a new medication.
“The touch points have multiplied,” Mr Herstein says. “If you define marketing as all those contacts that touch consumers, it's not just traditional above the line.”
To allocate money for all these forms of marketing, companies would like to follow a policy called media or channel neutrality.
In a holistic marketing world, the idea is that money should flow to the most effective means of delivering a message. But this is where the process gets complicated at a bureaucratic level.
In the real world, money for marketing comes from marketing budgets. But in the new world, the lines between marketing and other business activities is blurring. That makes allocating resources tricky.
A website, for instance, could be seen as a form of internet advertising. But websites also function as virtual stores.
The money to build a site could come from a marketing department or a product development department, says Chris Williamson, author of the Bellwether Report, a study of UK advertising patterns for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, an industry group.
The definitional issues get even more complicated in sectors such as pharmaceuticals. At some companies, medical education websites a key way of building relationships with customers are the province of the giant research departments of the pharmaceutical companies. At others, marketing departments take responsibility, says June Dawson, director of Ogilvy Healthworld UK, a medical marketing company. Mr Williamson says companies also use vastly different approaches to account for some of their in-store marketing activities.
For instance, some companies consider sales promotions to be a marketing expense, while others simply report lower revenue figures to account for the discounts.
“Different companies account for expenditure in different ways,” he says. “It's becoming very problematic to categorise activities in distinct subdivisions.”
Compounding the complexity is the difficulty companies are having in comparing the impact of different kinds of marketing activity. The language of marketing is derived mainly from television advertising. Companies pay media companies to, as the jargon has it, “buy eyeballs” with little regard to whether they are covered by eyelids.
But in holistic marketing, advertisers are no longer interested simply in reaching customers, but in engaging them. They are looking for customers who are paying attention to their marketing messages and who might be persuaded to communicate their enthusiasm for a product or service to others.
There are companies working with measurement tools that help them compare the impact of different forms of marketing messages.
Procter & Gamble and Nissan, for example, have turned to a company called Integration in Nicosia, Cyprus, that uses a process called a market contact audit or MCA to gauge the effectiveness of advertising in a given medium for a given product.
But without the widespread acceptance of systems to measure the impact of marketing in different media, companies find it difficult to change their marketing spending regime. “With some of this new media, it is much more difficult to put these budgets together,” says Alan Rutherford, global media director at Unilever.
Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media, says the basic problem is that in the absence of widely accepted metrics, corporate turf battles tend to break out.
“When you scramble things, you are changing people's jobs in an organisation and unless you have some measurement, people say, ‘Why change?'” he says. Mr Tobaccowala remains optimistic that companies will adapt. One sign of this, he says, was a decision a couple of years ago by Home Depot, the US retailer, to give its chief marketing officer, John Costello, responsibility for sales. “There used to be this fight between marketing and sales,” Mr Tobaccowala says. “Now, you are seeing more and more marketing officers getting more clout.”
But industry observers such as Mr Tobaccowala say that it could take years before companies will be able to match their rhetoric about holistic marketing with compatible budgetary and management processes.
“The more holistic measurement gets, the more things will be done that way,” he says. “We have just begun. It's a five- to 10-year process. The consumer, as always, will get there first.”
广告商寻找的圣杯
在大企业中，营销部门正在追逐一个新的“圣杯”，即“全方位营销”，这个词表明：企业正日益渴望利用更多样的手段与顾客沟通。
企业纷纷采用全方位营销，反映出两个基本因素。一是企业正对电视广告失去信心，而电视曾是企业的主要广告媒介；二是企业正对互联网以及其它选择产生兴趣。
不过，这种新的全方位营销体系也有一个大问题：不存在全方位营销预算这样的东西。此外，可能要等数年之后，企业才能采用精密的衡量体系和灵活的组织管理流程，而要让全方位营销成为现实(而不只是一个理想)，就需要具备这两项条件。
“我并不确信企业已经真正理解这一点，”美国金融服务业巨头美国运通(American Express) 高级副总裁巴里?赫斯登(Barry Herstein)说。他负责整合公司的国际交流事务。
当然，营销从来就不简单。传统上，企业将自己的营销努力分成所谓的“线上广告”(above-the-line advertising)如电视广告，和“线下活动”(below-the-line activities)如直邮广告。
但营销正变得愈加复杂，因为科技进步使消费者有能力避开广告。数码录像机让观众跳过电视商业广告，而软件让人们阻止网上的弹出式广告和不想要的电子邮件。
广告业的反应有两种基本形式。一是营销人员正在寻找新的地方做广告，从在男士小便器上方，到手机显示屏。二是他们正开始把任何一次与消费者的接触，都当作营销机会。
这里的想法是，在顾客碰巧会出现的任何场合吸引顾客，换句话说，这就是一种全方位手段。于是，广告公司现在已不仅仅考虑电视商业广告了。它们正努力思考，当消费者打电话到公司寻求资讯或进行投诉时，公司该如何回答。它们正寻求让购物体验更加有趣，为产品包装和店铺陈列注入新的活力，并增强科学性。
网站设计正涌现为一种特别有力的营销武器。为了与顾客建立更密切的联系，并使顾客允许企业向他们寄发广告电子邮件，企业正创建魅力难挡的网站，提供包罗万象的信息，从如何使用眼部化妆品，到如何自愿申请参加新药试验等。
“接触点已经成倍增长，”赫斯登先生说，“如果你把营销定义成所有与消费者接触的场合，那它就不只是传统的线上营销了。”
为了给所有这些营销方式分配资金，企业希望遵循一种被称为“媒体或渠道中性”的政策。
在全方位营销的世界中，人们的想法是，资金应当流向传导信息最有效的方式。但这正是营销流程在组织管理方面变得复杂之处。
在现实世界中，用于营销的资金来自营销预算。但在“新”世界中，营销和其它商业活动之间的界线正变得模糊。这使分配资源成为一件棘手的事。
比如说，网站可以被视为互联网广告的一种形式，但网站还可以充当虚拟商店。
《广告景气报告》(Bellwether Report)作者克里斯?威廉森(Chris Williamson)表示，建设网站的资金可以来自营销部门或产品开发部门。《广告景气报告》是一份有关英国广告模式的研究报告，提供给行业团体“广告从业者协会”(Institute of Practitioners in Advertising)。
在制药等产业，界定上的问题变得更加复杂。医药营销公司Ogilvy Healthworld UK总监琼?道森(June Dawson)表示，在一些制药公司，医学教育网站是建立与顾客关系的一个关键途径，归公司庞大的研究部门负责。而在其它公司，网站则由营销部门负责。威廉森先生表示，在为店内营销(in-store marketing)活动记账方面，各公司采取的做法也大不相同。
例如，一些公司认为促销手段是营销支出，而其它企业在将折扣入账时，只是报告较低的营业收入。
“不同的公司对支出的记账方式各不相同，”他说，“将每一项活动归入不同的细分账目，已经成了个大问题。”
企业在比较不同营销活动影响方面的困难，使问题更为复杂。营销语言主要由电视广告传达出去。企业向媒体公司付钱，正如行话所说那样“购买眼球”，但却很少关注眼球是否被眼睑遮住。
但在全方位营销中，广告客户感兴趣的不再仅仅是“达到”顾客，而是要与顾客“接触”。它们在寻找那些留意它们的营销信息的顾客，还有那些可能被说动，而将自己对某种产品或服务的热衷传达给别人的顾客。
有些公司借助计量工具来比较各种营销信息产生的影响。
比如宝洁(Procter Gamble)和日产(Nissan)就请塞浦路斯尼科西亚一家名为Integration的公司提供服务。该公司采用一种名叫“市场接触审计”(MCA)的程序，来测量某个特定媒体为某个特定产品做广告的效果。
但是，在衡量不同媒体营销效果的体系尚未被普遍接受的情况下，企业很难改革自己的营销支出体系。“有了某些新媒体，编制全部预算现在难得多，”联合利华(Unilever)全球媒体总监艾伦?卢瑟福(Alan Rutherford)表示。
Publicis Groupe Media首席创新官里沙德?托巴科瓦拉(Rishad Tobaccowala)表示，根本问题是，在衡量标准未被广泛接受的情况下，企业内部往往会爆发地盘争夺战。
“当你进行调整时，你将改变人们在一个机构里的工作，除非你有某种衡量标准，否则人们会问，‘为什么改变？’”他说。托巴科瓦拉先生仍乐观地认为，企业会适应变化。他说，一个迹象就是，美国零售商家得宝(Home Depot)几年前决定，让首席营销官约翰?科斯特洛(John Costello)负责销售。“过去营销和销售部门之间常有这种争斗，”托巴科瓦拉先生表示，“现在你会发现，越来越多的营销官正获得更大的权力。”
但托巴科瓦拉先生等业内观察人士表示，可能要过上几年，企业才有能力用相称的预算和管理流程，配合自己对全方位营销的口头赞同。
“衡量手段越是全方位，营销就越会得到全方位实施，”他说，“我们才刚刚开始，它要花上5至10年。消费者会一如既往地第一个到达目标。”
