Multichannel Marketing Class May 18 Intro

The first night we covered what it means to be a direct versus interactive marketer and all the different channels that marketers are faced with managing today. We made the distinction between a media channel and a fulfillment or distribution channel. There are many media channels today and some of them are quite new, such as social media, facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc. One trend is that consumers are in charge and want to define the brand, such as the web site created by consumers that revolves around Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Who knew consumers were so passionate about the brands they use? Marketers are dealing with how to integrate these new media channels into their plans. At the same time it is becoming more difficult to isolate the effects of one media channel veruss another on purchase behavior. Online influenced retail sales are growing rapidly and consumers will go online to hear more about informaion they have received in print or in a radio or TV commercial. Our guest speaker Michelle Blechman from Abbott Labs said how difficult it is to isolate the effects of various media in the pharmeceutical industry and that top executives have to be educated; even if the highest ROI is from the web, eliminating TV advertising won't necessarily increase ROI because without the TV spend, the brand awareness dips and people stop going to the web. Michelle really stressed the importance of integrated marketing communications. She also reinforced what I said about the pressure on marketers to measure and report ROI and justify their existence. I was recently interviewed on social media usage in marketing. Here is a link to that article.
http://www.cob.niu.edu/highlights/NIU_CHI_0509.pdf