This paradigm shift applies to marketing inside companies and equally at the agencies responsible for communicating brands and connecting them to consumers. And I believe that the prime responsibility rests with the direct marketers at clients and agencies to define the new paradigm shift and demonstrate the power of a new integrated approach to marketing driven by knowledge.
But the idea of 'integration' is over-used, often abused, and has little credibility with marketers, promised so much but delivered so little.
So I call on Edward O Wilson, biologist and publisher five years ago of 'Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge'. The word "consilience" means "a jumping together of knowledge by the linking of facts across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation". For science and society, Wilson preferred consilience to coherence, and for marketing, I definitely prefer "unity of knowledge" to integration.
Wilson's scope is ambitious. He argues for this "jumping together of knowledge" across the four great disciplines and (if you think about it) issues of today: biology, ethics, environment and social sciences.
The four great disciplines in marketing are brand advertising (in which I include PR), media, direct marketing and -- I hope you are not surprised -- internal marketing.
Sales promotion I class not as a discipline but as a tool to drive business, vital to any of the disciplines. The standalone sales promotion sector is in decline. The rapid re-invention of successful promotion agencies as direct marketers proves the point.
Equally, interactive or digital marketing is a subset of both direct marketing and advertising, and will be a dynamic to propel the evolution of both.
Clients seek new solutions. Their single biggest concern today is how to "go to market" across media and channels -- in other words how to make sense of the myriad of customer touch points now available to them.
The answer starts with the pursuit of knowledge about consumers and channels and, more importantly, with the unity of that knowledge across functions within the client and across disciplines within the agency.
Direct marketing has always been a knowledge business. We have long built customer databases, analysing the data to target our communications. This enables us to track sales and measure return on investment through the information systems of our clients. The technology today available to marketers to extract and apply knowledge is open, user-friendly and affordable.
Our knowledge, however, remains silo-ed, and as a result we are often perceived as a downstream or project activity, following upstream strategy and brand communication. We rarely touch the most critical upstream aspects of a client's business: product development, portfolio analysis, competitive strategy, brand planning, and media investment (where the serious marketing money goes).
It is time for direct marketers to go the heart of the total value chain. The focus on accountability and the demand for customer knowledge creates the new paradigm.
Our founder Lester Wunderman was among the first to recognise that direct marketing is neither channel nor medium but an approach to marketing with the two defining characteristics that it is based on customer knowledge and is inclusive of all communications with customers, channels and media.
As direct marketers, we believe we have three sources of knowledge that we must unify with our peers from the other disciplines: 1. We understand brand experiences; 2. We understand customer behaviour and financial value; 3. We understand customer responsiveness and demand generation.
This is emphatically not integration, at least not as routinely proposed.
The conventional approach to integration puts the disciplines together for implementation. We believe in planning holistically but executing separately through the distinct disciplines, each of which is driven by specific skills, capabilities and processes.
The new paradigm will signal the end of direct marketing as we know it, if we define direct marketing only as remote direct communications to and from consumers. Direct marketing can leverage its knowledge of consumers to help businesses build high experience brands, deliver ROI and develop competitive strategies.
Clients will no longer need traditional direct marketing agencies, nor will they need promotional agencies, interactive agencies, data consultants, etc. They will need agencies that can partner with the brand agency and media agency to fuse all data sources and make the most powerful and effective use of all the available channels and touch points.
The immediate impact of change is almost always overestimated, and the long-term effect underestimated. See the present crisis in marketing as this opportunity. We are about to be part of a simple but fundamental paradigm shift propelled by the pursuit of consumer knowledge.
Please write to Stewart Pearson with feedback and opinion here.