No, this is not the unauthorized mini biography of Gene Simmons of the slightly strange rock group from the 1970's. It is, however, the old mantra of Keep it Simple, Stupid. Integration is freakishly complicated but the best way to handle complexity is to break it down into simple steps. With over 1.24M references to "integrated technology marketing" in Google and over 340,000 references for "integrated technology marketing best practices," there is just too much stuff out there. Irrelevant of where you go or even who you listen to there is an absolute rule of thumb: Watch how customers do this stuff first. Integration is expensive otherwise.
Major league baseball just announced plans to think about and maybe test instant replay. Wouldn't it be great to be able to use instant replay in our marketing? Can you imagine before we actually have to make a decision we can look at the end result, time and time again before we press the decision button? It would be so much easier to give absolutes in our decisions if we could see the future in a perfect way. Life unfortunately is not instant replay-able and nor can marketing be. Our need to be perfect often gets in the way of "best practices." What I mean by this is in our pursuit of the highest immediate performance we underestimate the power of learning from experiments and something as simple as chance. We often look to do the same thing, time and time again and expect different results - hoping to get learning without experimentation. We should experiment and tell our colleagues we are experimenting. This will change the way we all review the learnings from the work.