Kellogg on Integrated Marketing [Hardcover]

This book has a good compendium of what "integrated marketing" is all about. For most of us, we can't afford expensive TV campaigns, and need to address our customers in diverse ways, and measuring along the way. For me, CPM and audiences and demographics make no sense, so I appreciated this books more pragmatic cases studies.

Particularly for high tech companies, if you need a good overview of what it takes to create communities, create "BUZZ", and get people excited about your product in a natural way; this book is the best out there (read Chapter 6). The internet is a new medium, but most marketing is still primitive (pop ups? anyone?). There are some good ideas here on how to go about it the right way.

As with any compilation of articles, there are different voices and styles; some are better than others. Skip the bad ones.

But it's still only going to cost less than 10 minutes of your average marketing consultant; so buy it.

Because of the quality of the institutions behind the book it is easy to take the quality of this book for granted. So it is for the same reason that I thought this book merits a detailed review and explain why a simple reader like me gives it no more than 2 stars (meaning that the book is not the worst out there, but it is not quite an "average" book either).

I believe that most of the problem lies on the Editors of the book. I can't imagine how difficult must be to put together people and views from two different institutions (Kellogg Business School and Medill School of Journalism) plus collaborators from other academic institutions and independent consulting companies. What is clear is that the Editors did not succeed in creating a cohesive book: in some cases it is because of the selection of topics/subjects discussed, in some cases because of the selection of the authors and their style, but most importantly because the book lacks a common solid philosophy. It feels more like a collection of disparate work than a book.

Most of the chapters feel repetitive and disconnected. They range from a generalist view of the world (typical from business schools), to detailed discussions of technical subjects (typical from industry practitioners). These two views are not balanced in each chapter (which could be a positive thing), but actually each chapter is one or the other, which creates a mixed feeling of peaks and valleys as you read the book. So overall, the book does not achieve a compelling balance for the reader and fails to leave the reader with a couple of big ideas that help her approach the "issue" of Integrated Marketing.

A closer look by chapter

I truly enjoyed the Introduction to the book and chapter 3 (The Tao of Customer Loyalty). The article is direct, clear, and strong, with great common sense. Unfortunately, most of the good things about the book stop here.

Both chapter 4 and 5 are extremely repetitive as both build on the idea of customer-brand contact points, which should be to most readers an "old" concept already. Chapter 6 has great ideas on the need to understand different communities to achieve truly viral marketing. Unfortunately, I found the authors' style very difficult to read and the chapter extremely long. Just to give you an idea, this chapter is almost 20% of the book and there are other 13 chapters. This is again something the Editors should have spotted.

Chapter 7 on Acquiring The Right Customers is extremely basic, while chapters 8 (Database Sub-segmentation), 9 (Customer Profitability), and 11 (Scoring Models) are extremely technical and address how to look and organize data to help in the marketing decision making process. Then we have chapter 10 on Decision Guidance Systems, which feels that shouldn't belong to this book.

Chapter 12 addresses how the Web has the potential to deliver and support Integrated Marketing ideas. This explanation was needed and given by many authors 3 or 4 years ago. So while true, the chapter is pretty much a laggard in its perspectives. I don't think there is anyone today that does not understand this.

Chapter 13 (An illustration of Integrated Marketing) is simply appalling. Basically the author builds a theoretical example of what IM is supposed to look like. It is simply a waste of time and effort.

And finally, Chapter 14 (Reflections on Becoming a Great Marketing Organization) has a good authoritative tone and interesting closing thoughts. Though as the closing chapter of the book, suffers the same issues as the remaining of he book: the chapter is individualistic and pretty much ignores the content from previous chapters.

So as a closing thought on this review, I would say that this book could suffer from what was said about the old conglomerate structures: they are both worth more if sold (read) separately! The editorial value of bringing ideas and people together to create even more value is simply not achieved in this book.