4 Options for integrating marketing campaigns

Our summary of the IPA new models of marketing effectiveness report

As marketers, we use the expression “integrated campaign” often, but of course in practice, the degree to which campaigns are truly integrated across channels varies.

Recently the IPA released a new report models of marketing effectiveness which  shows the popularity of alternative options for campaign integration.

It’s certainly an exhaustive study with analysis of over 250 IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies, entered over a seven-year period (2004-2010) including examples from Hovis, O2, Virgin Atlantic, HSBC, E4 Skins, Johnnie Walker and more.

I hope our writeup is useful in helping prompt ideas on how you can tackle integration.

4 Options for integrated campaign planning

The report defines 4 options for integration. Analysis of campaign effectiveness reviewed hard measures including sales gain, market share gain, reduction of price sensitivity, customer retention, customer acquisition, profit gain and market share defence. Soft measures reviewed include brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand trust, brand differentiation, brand belief, brand fame and brand values.

I’ve added some examples from the mobile industry.

1. No integration — single channel or campaigns using a number of channels but not integrating consistently across them. Analysis suggests that campaigns with no obvious integration or who use only one channel are good at reducing price sensitivity but have little impact on market share.
2. Advertising-led integration — channels unified around a common creative idea / ‘matching luggage’ approach. The Orange “I Am” campaign is an example of this. Traditionally integrated advertising-led campaigns are more effective at share gain and customer acquisition.
3. Brand idea-led ‘orchestration’ - unified around a shared brand concept or needstate platform, often built around core brand values of the organisation. The O2 Gurus campaign for customer service is a good example of this. Analysis of campaigns suggests that brand idea-led campaigns are highly effective in retention, share defence and profit gain.
4. Participation led ‘orchestration’ — goal is to create a common dialogue or conversation, has emerged in latter years, partly driven by digital media. The Blackberry “Love What You Do” campaign from a couple of years ago encouraged users to share in a participation campaign. The analysis in the report suggests that participation-led campaigns underperform on hard sales measures but excel in rewarding existing users and on brand fame. Since they are relatively new, they are a small proportion of the total.

The report has been criticised for this breakdown since you can see that is overlap between the integration options - for example, many campaigns will seek to include 4 today. But overlap is inevitable, does it matter? No, the benefit of having these options is to enable review of campaign elements. It’s why each option starts with “led”!

Other campaign integration findings from the report

These are some of the other findings that caught our eye:

1. Multichannel campaigns are better at driving effectiveness than single channel activity. 78% of cases with three channels demonstrate hard business effects versus 67% of those with only one channel; there is however a point of diminishing returns beyond three channels. It’s surprising this difference isn’t larger, but multiple channels fare well when considering other measures.
2. Campaigns that include TV are on average more effective than those that don’t. Despite the huge growth of alternative bought media channels over the past decade, adding TV into the marketing mix still produces better results on both hard and soft measures, than not including the medium: 75% of case studies with very high effectiveness in hard business results used TV, while 53% didn’t; and 66% of cases that had high effectiveness in soft business benefits used TV, while 49% didn’t.

Brand and/or Response campaigns

This report doesn’t look at the summary at the success according to the classic campaign type of brand or response led. Comms agency Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer has good analysis on this. Greg Rimmer of HMDG characterises the evolution of brand response well in this post on the rise of of brand-response:

“Brand Response emerged as a significant force in the ’00s and the trend looks set to continue. This has had significant implications for strategy, creative, media and evaluative approach. While this may risk over-simplification, marketing communications seems to have moved through three distinct phases in the lifetime of the IPA Awards.

1. Brand or Response 80’s. Marketers make a choice between two discrete activities. Brand-building and other longer term activities are separate from short-term sales or response-driving activities. They are generally delivered by different campaigns through different channels. Typically, TV is used for ‘brand’ and direct marketing. The majority of the IPA cases from the 1980s reflect this thinking.
2. Brand and Response 90’s. The two elements are treated as distinct but complementary activities within a campaign assisted by some executional links. The Grand Prix-winning Tesco case of 2000 used Every Little Helps and a consistent tone of voice across different campaigns for brand and tactical work.
3. Brand Response 00’s. A seamless blend of both types of activity is delivered through a single campaign. The purpose of all activity is to drive response (both short and longer term) while building the brand.

Building brands and driving sales are no longer mutually exclusive activities, they are now symbiotic. Critically, the two elements create a powerful virtuous circle where brand helps build response, and the response itself helps build the brand".