By Tracey Robinson-English

Today, all companies – large or small, media, service, or packaged-goods manufacturers - need to know their customers. Really know them.

That's why they turn to top-notch integrated marketing professionals to distill insights about customer behavior from mountains of consumer information, believes Medill's Tom Collinger.

By distilling these insights into actionable marketing and communications strategies, companies can better engage and entertain customers, said Collinger, a frequent lecturer in MMC's programs who is Associate Dean and Chair of the Integrated Marketing Communication's Program (IMC) at Northwestern's Medill School. A former Leo Burnett advertising executive, he is a widely recognized expert on integrated marketing communications, e-commerce, database and customer relationship management.

Collinger said marketers are in the midst of an unnerving revolution, on the verge of the first consumer-led recession in decades.

"This shift is not just here at Medill's IMC program," Collinger said. "It's a shift that has to do with how companies go about managing their brands - starting with analyzing consumer and stakeholder behaviors to better segment them, which ultimately allows for greater relevance."

"Marketers who used to push out messages on huge advertising budgets now need to listen to consumers and stakeholders as they pull messages [from them], and take advantage of this data to best present a full brand experience, at all points of contact, and all on a 24/7 basis," said Collinger.

To further the competitive advantage, companies must develop an innovation strategy that treats the brand as a media delivering information and services to customers consistently across multiple platforms, Collinger continued. In other words, the brand experience must meet customer expectations in every way. With so many options at their fingertips, customers will otherwise shop elsewhere.

"Whoever you are – whether you are Campbell Soup, Orbitz or The New York Times – every brand experience is a reflection of that brand," he said. "You can't segregate things out like customer service. It's not separate from the experience. It's entirely integrated as part of the brand’s experience."

"In the case of Dell, it stubbed its toe because Dell was not meeting customer service expectations. Dell didn't deliver and the expectation of the brand suffered," Collinger added. "The ability to manage all of these expectations around a brand and data is integrated marketing communications today."

Internet communication, to include the fast growing social networks, is playing a big role in the development of brand perception, he said.

"Now consumers form their views of products by communicating with one another on the Internet." Collinger said. For example, last year a blogger recorded a company salesman refusing to cancel his AOL account when asked repeatedly to do so. "The incident was all over the Internet, eroding the good will exists in the AOL's brand."

In contrast, Google remains one of the best known brands in the world, but doesn't advertise, he said, nor did Starbucks, until relatively recently. "The explosion of data makes it both possible and challenging to address these particular needs, similarities and differences, and ask the question 'what does the customer really want?'"

Today's market shifts are challenging but they create opportunities for graduates of the kind of integrated marketing communication program pioneered at Medill, which educates students for careers in marketing communications and marketing management. Medill's IMC program combines the traditional areas of marketing communications with business skills in marketing, finance, statistics and organizational behavior to form a unique program on the cutting edge of marketing communications and customer relationship management.

The result is solution-driven training and forward-thinking graduates working creatively to address customer marketing communications problems, Collinger said.

"There probably hasn't been a more exciting time than it is right now for a marketer because of the collision of ideas and analysis," Collinger said. "The changes in consumer behavior and technology make it more interesting for Imarketers."


Collinger regularly teaches in MMC's Advanced Executive Program, NAB Management Development Seminar, and custom programs.


This article, by Tracey Robinson-English, is part of a series on experts who regularly teach in Media Management Center programs and/or work with MMC on cutting-edge research. Robinson-English, a Northwestern alum of Medill and the School of Communication, is a consultant to the Media Management Center.


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