(Fortune) -- There was a time when the geeks who keep a company's tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. You called the chief information officer when you needed a server upgrade, not a strategic plan. As Paris Hilton might say, “really?” If this is news to you, then your marketing is going to be really out of whack with the new realities we face. The article argues that the CIO now needs to put their business skills into place. Some of this is driven by the need to “tighten belts” and the remainder is a key learning lesson we must think hard about in terms of how we structure our marketing:
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We are a few days past the annual chocolate and flowers fest of Valentine’s Day and it has occurred to me that, just as Forrest Gump may have told you, you never know what you’re going to get. This warning holds true particularly when you are handed one of the smaller boxes that do not contain a nice description inside them. My wife's (Lara) approach to this is smart but maybe not very enticing to others: she takes a small bite from each chocolate, tasting them. Please see the photograph below. Some chocolates she enjoys, some she becomes tentative of, and some surprise her. However, in other situations she feels that the insides could be great and she is just as often disappointed as overjoyed. Unfortunately for many of us, marketing and integrated marketing too often resemble this experience.
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Like billions of school children around the world I dreaded the day when I had to bring home my school report card. Unlike the millions who did well, mine was at best a mixed bag and at worst a consistently weak story. One year, dreading my father’s reaction (verbal and never physical), I “accidentally” lost my report card near the corner store. As luck would have it, some well meaning school colleague handed it in and the shop owner stuck it facing outward for the world (OK, Llanedeyrn Road in Cardiff, Wales) to see. The humiliation may well have spurred me later in life but at the time it was more embarrassing than admitting I listened to music by David Cassidy.
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In Part Two of this blog we continue with the remaining 4 observations from Tuesday, January 27, 2009.
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Even my sister’s children in the UK say "we are now in a recession." That may not be a surprise if they were adolescents but they are both less than ten years old. To some that argues that adults have been in denial for a long time and children are very open to tell the truth when they see it happen. It certainly took the US government over a year to acknowledge that we were in a recession. The essence here is that if it takes a year or so to flag an economic downturn and a quarter or two for our marketing to react, then we need to think now about the upturn. To build for that and take advantage of riding that wave might take as long, so we cannot afford for our marketing to be that slow to react to the upside as for many of us it is in the downturn.
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A funny thing happened to mobile advertising as we entered this year. The cries of now-is-the-dawn-of-a-new-age took a step or two back. After years of ‘this is the year for mobile advertising’ we thought we would try something novel and actually ask customers who had just bought a smartphone (or were about to buy one) if they were open the concept. We even said it would cost no more and they would have to sign up in order to avoid junk messages - or at least some of it.
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We have all been there and the complexities of integrated marketing drive a very different desire for experimentation than ever before. In an old world far, far away was a method for marketing communications that required the management of a lot fewer choices, more or less, with only slight variations or changes in balances. In the new integrated world we have gone from maybe three or four cogs to hundreds, interacting together and changing interactions. The tendency in the new integrated world is to hang on like crazy to stuff that might appear to be working because there are just too many other variables that we do not have the time, money and maybe even buy-in to try.
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