Making Marketing Music: Integrated Marketing Communications at Work

Advertising is the most visible aspect of marketing communications, but it is often just an introductory greeting, the first handshake. What your target customer sees, hears and experiences of the product and the brand-in use, at retail, in social media and at other points of interaction-must be in keeping with the expectations its advertising sets up. Putting them all together and making them work consistently and with synergy is what is called integrated marketing communications.

Running an integrated marketing communications programme is like making music, says author Chintamani Rao. The music we hear is a composite whole made up of the sounds of different instruments. They don't all make the same sound at the same time but played together they move us. And that is how marketing communications must work.

To produce that effect an orchestra performs to a musical score, under the direction of a conductor. So must marketing communications. When we have a plan, assemble our communications instruments and conduct them effectively to make one big sound, we can move millions to think, feel and act.

Drawing upon his own long and diverse experience as well as his observations as a lifelong student of marketing, the author tells us how integrated marketing communications works, why it doesn't, and how to make marketing music.