Masters of Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing comprises all disciplines in the marketing department:

• brand AND direct marketers
• acquisition AND customer marketers
• online AND offline marketers

Thought leaders on multichannel marketing are therefore found in all corners of the field.

A central observation in my Multichannel Marketing book is that marketers in each of these areas have been facing and solving multichannel challenges for a long time. For instance, Internet marketers integrate websites, email, search, advertising, and many other channels.

Yet, marketers from different disciplines have not been cooperating in the past and have not shared their multiple multichannel methods with each other. In fact, they used to rarely even speak with each other. All the while they are talking about very similar things.

Where is the Rosetta Stone for online, direct, and brand marketers?

I bet that if we took the blogrolls from 500 marketers’ blogs and drew a network map of the connections between these blogs, we would see a lot of links between blogs from marketers within each discipline. But we will probably see much fewer links between blogs from marketers from different disciplines, i.e. online, direct, and brand.

That is chunnel vision (single channel tunnel vision). It must go.

Allow me to pay homage in coming posts to the master minds who have left chunnel vision behind. For example the following:

• Andy Fisher and the Avenue A | Razorfish team for their refusal to always assume that the most recent click from an advertisememt deserves all the credit for resulting business
• Bob Thompson and the bloggers at CustomerThink.com for their relentless focus on the customer experience beyond just customer marketing
• Don Peppers & Martha Rogers for their clarity of vision that good business today requires a good customer experience which requires managing relationships across multiple channels
• Elana Anderson, NxtEra Marketing, for her drive to guide companies towards integrated marketing
• Hurol Inan, CEO of Bienalto, for his customer-centric approach to web analytics and for publishing the first ever book on the subject in 2001, i.e. even before Jim Sterne.
• Jack Aaronson, CEO of The Aaronson Group. for his “embrace it, then trace it” approach to integrated multichannel marketing
• Jim Lenskold, President of the LenskoldGroup, for separating truth from fiction when it comes to ROI analysis for marketing
• Jim Novo, The Drilling Down Project, for applying offline marketing principles to online marketing
• Kevin Hillstrom, MineThatData, for his Multichannel Forensics method and his admirable advice that is so firmly anchored in reality
• Rex Briggs, Marketing Evolution for his cross media optimization studies, measuring the “impossible to measure”.

I am heavily indebted to these folks and look forward to sharing my favorite quotes from their work.