Today’s post is from Emily Griebel, an Integration Architect at McKee Wallwork & Company. Emily leads our Integration Architecture practice and is responsible for ensuring our clients’ marketing plans are seamlessly interwoven. If you’re interested in an audit of your marketing plan, you can reach her at EGriebel@mwcmail.com, or @MWCemily on Twitter.

I recently spoke at a PR conference on the topic of Integrated Marketing. As head of the Integration Architecture department at McKee Wallwork & Company, I felt pretty confident in the subject matter but was struggling with a good way to summarize my material. In the middle of the night (when most ideas come to me), the perfect synopsis popped in my head so I reached for my iPhone and entered a note containing four words:

1. Consistency
2. Continuity
3. Perseverance
4. Patience

To me, these four words best represent the traits required to develop, launch, and maintain a successful integrated marketing program. Brands that exhibit these qualities are not only triumphant in their marketing endeavors, but also in reaching their business objectives. Think: Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, Victoria’s Secret, Ikea, GE, and IBM. Their enduring success is not by accident. Each of these companies has worked diligently over many, many years to implement solid marketing strategies that are integrated throughout the entire organization. How do they do this?

First, they deliberately identify their marketing goals, define their targets, and create distinct identities. This part isn’t easily and quickly done and could be a whole other blog post. I’m going to focus here on what happens next. Assuming those items are in place, the next step is to design a long-term, strategic integrated marketing program. The idea is to craft a suite of tactics that work together to create a seamless experience for the consumer/customer.

Developing this type of integrated plan is tough and requires:

1. CONSISTENCY (harmony between parts): A seamless tactical plan should address each of the Four Ps – Product, Price, Place and Promotion. This requires that various departments across the organization work together. The marketing department should be the liaison between management, operations, R&D, customer relations, IT, sales, HR, etc. to ensure that all facets of the company are focused on making the consumer experience consistent.
2. CONTINUITY (staying the same over time): No matter what industry the brand is in, the four stages of the customer life cycle remain true – Attraction, Conversion, Retention and Engagement. It’s crucial that your communications across each of these stages are unwavering, similar in tone and continuous over time. This isn’t to say that messages or tactics can’t be refined, but the overall brand identity should remain constant.
3. PERSEVERANCE (steady over a long period despite difficulties): Developing and maintaining an integrated marketing program is hard work. It takes discipline and drive to make it work, even more so to make it last. Don’t give up. Keep pushing to ensure the company is working well together to create this uninterrupted consumer experience.
4. PATIENCE (persist despite complexities): With the proliferation of so many new marketing options, it’s easy to say something “isn’t working”. And with the strain of today’s economic conditions, there’s huge pressure on marketers to prove success. This can lead to changes or even overhauls of marketing plans too soon. It’s important to remain calm and stick with what you believe in for your brand. If you deliberately and strategically created a brand platform and coinciding marketing plan, then give it time to work. Think about how long Apple, Nike and especially Coca-Cola have been promoting innovation, motivation and happiness respectively. There’s a reason those businesses are so successful, and it’s definitely not because they gave up and changed direction too soon.

So if your brand can keep these four tenets in mind when designing an integrated marketing program, you will be more likely to see success in your efforts.

The misuse and abuse of  advertising effectiveness research  is getting wearying. The latest case in point was committed by a reputable research company, compounded by a leading trade magazine under the headline, “See the Most Effective Magazine Ads of 2011”.

According to this study, the ads pictured here were among the top ten most engaging, besting 87,000 others that appeared in national consumer magazines last year. Really. Their “engagement score” was based on the percentage of readers who said they read, or “noted,” each ad along with the percentage who took any action (visited a website, clipped a coupon, recommended the product, made a purchase, etc.) as a result of seeing the ad.

J.D. Power and Associates recently published it’s 2012 U.S. Bank Customer Switching and Acquisition study. As you might expect, the leading reason consumers cite for switching banks is pesky and annoying fees. Following fee fatigue, poor service is most often blamed for dumping a bank, particularly among customers of the largest financial institutions.

No surprise there. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find an interesting observation. Michael Beird, director of the banking services practice at J.D. Power, says that while fees are “the proverbial straws that break the camel’s back,” they’re not the entirety of the problem. Poor service experiences take customers to the brink, while fee increases simply push them over the edge.

Beird’s observation about customer defection reflects on what might be labeled “hidden inaccuracies” in typical marketing ROI analyses. It’s natural for marketers to conclude that their most recent offer is solely or primarily responsible for attracting a new customer, based upon the data they collect. But if it’s seldom true that a single event would cause customers to defect from a brand, why would we presume it to be true in customer attraction?

In my latest Businessweek.com column I caution marketers to be wary of campaign metrics for just this reason. Data looks so official, especially when ROI analyses show results to the thousandth percentile. But following the data alone would lead banks to conclude that as long as they don’t offend customers with fees they’ll be sitting pretty, when the truth is far from that.

The same is true in customer attraction. You can easily measure redemption rates of a single offer, but they’ll never be an accurate representation of the complexity of the decision process that led up to the transaction. And if your offer includes a discount, there’s no telling–i.e. no way to measure–the long term damage you’re causing to your brand equity.

By all means, measure away. Just be very, very careful about the conclusions you draw. If you’re half right, you could be all wrong.