Behavioural signs - Moving from IMC to ICBM

Professor of Advertising Robert Lauterborn thinks that it is now time to move away from Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) and focus on ICBM — or Integrated Customer Behaviour Management.


Integrated marketing communications — IMC, in short — was a label that Don Schultz, Stan Tannenbaum and Robert Lauterborn stuck on to a process a decade ago in a book titled Integrated Marketing Communications: Pulling It Together and Making It Work. What they thought would be describing, was a strategic problem-solving approach, a new way of thinking and working, a banner under which multiple functions could march together in lockstep to accomplish a business objective accountably. Instead, what IMC has come to mean to many people is little more than ‘two-from-Column A, one-from-Column B’ media selection. IMC is too often perceived even by the authors of some subsequent textbooks as simply making sure that PR efforts are in synch with advertising placements. IMC, therefore, has been pigeonholed as an end-of-the-food-chain function that only kicks in at the tactical level and then only deals with communication issues.


Maybe its time to blow it all away and rebuild the concept… so here comes ICBM - Integrated Customer Behavior Management. IMC’s vision was, may be too limited. ICBM integrates everything that impacts customer behaviour. Product development to meet customer needs more precisely. Packaging that communicates with equal precision. Pricing that reflects the value the customer perceives in the product, compared to other ways to satisfy the need or want. A distribution scheme that makes it convenient for the customer to buy. Channel management, sales management, financing, CRM, TQM, Six Sigma and whatever else needs to be happening to change how the customer thinks and behaves, plus the timing of it all and the dialogue around it, internal and external — all of that is part of ICBM.


And, yes, the multidimensional, interactive, continuously measured communication package that connects the brand or product and the customer, because that’s what makes the whole process lift off and stay in orbit.


Here’s the thinking that fuels the ICBM concept:
1. Profitability is a function of customer behaviour.
2. Any programme launched without specific, measurable behavioural objectives is doomed to
veer off course.
3. Marketing and marketing communications are investment functions, and the return on
investment is a computation based on the incremental revenue that results from altered
customer behaviour.


Here’s how to launch the ICBM process:

1.What core business objective does the company want to achieve?
2. What is the net value of success to the company ?
3. Exactly whose behaviour needs to be changed for these results to happen?
4. Exactly what do we want these people to do, and why should they do it?
5. How do we engage them in a dialogue over time to make it happen?
6. How will we measure success? How will we demonstrate a return on the investment?


(source : Economic Times, March 21, 2007)