In my opinion, integrated marketing is the integration of the whole marketing concept. More subtly, the concept of customer-centric in integrated marketing is completely consistent with the concept of "all users are the core and user experience is king" in the Internet era. For a deeper discussion on integrated marketing, we have to go back to Don Schultz's Integrated Marketing Communication. The core of Schultz's theory is from the 4P era (product, price, place and promotion) to the 4C era (consumer, cost, convenience and communication), because the 4P theory is put forward on the basis that one party is a consumer and the other party is a communication. This process leads to the illusion that marketers control everything. What they have to do is to push the product out (pursuing sound volume and sales volume, to put it bluntly, exposure, exposure and re-exposure). As long as the products and services are sold, everything will be settled. The so-called marketing means "at this moment, this person, this place, this matter". At that time, the theory was effective because there were few channels and competing products, and the media and consumers were very simple. Nowadays, consumers' demands are getting higher and higher, more and more personalized, and they are getting tired of the traditional forced marketing methods. They don't want to see TV advertisements and outdoor advertisements, and even prefer to spend money to block advertisements on video websites. Consumers hold the initiative, and enterprises need to carry out marketing work around consumers. 4P theory aims at meeting market demand, attaches importance to products, prices and channels, and represents the position of enterprises, not customers. 4P theory guides the sales staff to sell how many products to customers, where to sell them and how to sell them to customers. 4C theory aims at consumer demand, emphasizing that enterprises should put the pursuit of customer satisfaction in the first place, products must meet customer requirements, and at the same time reduce the purchase cost of customers and the convenience of the purchase process. Finally, effective marketing communication with consumers is the core. How to communicate effectively with consumers? 1, collect product feedback information (user survey, e-commerce evaluation, etc. ), the fundamental purpose is to improve the function, characteristics, price and quality of products to meet the use of consumers; 2. The fundamental purpose of collecting users' purchasing experience is to improve the purchasing process and satisfy users' purchasing with the best purchasing experience. 3. Try to improve the loyalty of consumers, such as supermarket membership cards and hungry member red envelope cards, in order to let you continue to buy here next time and increase the loyalty of consumers. Getting the feedback of products and advertisements directly from consumers is a process of information integration and collection, which changes the role of consumers. Traditional marketing is to "attract consumers' attention", while integrated marketing is to "invite consumers' attention", so that consumers can take the initiative. In fact, the transition from 4P theory to 4C theory is simply understood as the transition from taking enterprises as the core to taking customers as the core. 1. Instead of selling products that you can make, sell products that customers want to buy. 2. Forget the pricing strategy for the time being, but understand the cost that consumers pay to meet their needs and desires. 3. Regardless of the channel strategy for the time being, think about how to facilitate consumers to buy goods. 4. Instead of considering how to promote sales, we should consider how to fully communicate with consumers, listen to their inner calls and spiritual demands, gain insight into their explicit and implicit needs, and even turn consumers' complaints and complaints into opportunities for innovation and motivation for improvement. The core of integrated marketing is to integrate all the resources inside and outside the enterprise into a "model", then guide the marketing behavior and fully mobilize all the resources to achieve the unified communication goal beneficial to the enterprise. Users contact with enterprises in various ways, and convey a unified and clear corporate image to users through all contact points, so that consumers can obtain consistent information about a brand from different information channels (advertising, PR, promotional activities, distribution, channels, packaging, etc.). However, in the new social environment, it has evolved from 4C to a new SIVA theory (customer-oriented innovative integrated marketing), including: solving problems for customers; We need to know what problems users have, what needs they have and what solutions I can provide. The ultimate goal is to understand consumers. Provide information to customers; What kind of information will consumers think of? What is the quantity? What is the channel? How can I provide it to them? Provide value to customers; In addition to asking users what kind of value they give to the company, we should also pay attention to what kind of value the company provides to users (such as the superior cost performance of Xiaomi and the "natural pride" of Hammer Technology), which customers can get at any time; How do users know about us? How to get it? (For example, through which media did you come into contact with our advertising information? Through wechat or technology news? This eventually changed the direction of information transmission in marketing activities. Marketers no longer dominate everything, and rights have all returned to consumers. Users or potential users become people who send information, not people who ask for information, and enterprises become recipients and responders. Finally, integrated marketing should master several key words: 1, all contact points, all contact points between consumers and enterprises can be used as channels for information transmission. 2. Information flow and operation information are the core work of marketing. 3. Unite and communicate and speak with one voice. Each piece of information should be integrated and echoed to support other information or impressions about the brand. 4. Interaction. Schultz put forward a communication model: propaganda, acceptance, cognitive response, attitude, intention and behavior. Communicators and audiences are interactive, and brands spread in another way according to consumers' reactions and attitudes. Attached is an interview between Don Schultz himself and the manager, which can deepen our understanding of the whole integrated marketing. Manager: The financial crisis since 2008 has brought great impact to the world economy, resulting in shrinking global consumer market and slowing economic growth. The external conditions that originally supported China's manufacturing industry have also undergone tremendous changes. How should the manufacturing enterprises in China deal with these problems? Don Schultz: Undoubtedly, the financial crisis has brought great changes to the world economic structure. Therefore, China enterprises that encounter difficulties are not good at making changes, because the American market cannot recover, and the European market is even worse. What China is facing now is how to change from export-oriented to domestic demand. Many enterprises in China have many years of export history, but they lack experience in the domestic consumer market. What they face is not whether they can sell their products to the world, but how to sell them to domestic consumers. If a company wants to have a foundation, it must first do a good job in the local market and the domestic market before it can truly develop globally. If consumers in China don't believe China products, will consumers in other countries believe them? I have taught many EMBA students from China at Northwestern University. They like taking pictures very much, so I asked them: How many people are carrying China brand cameras? They said no one brought it because China's camera was not good. I said turn your camera upside down. Almost all of them say "MadeinChina". These cameras are all made in China and assembled in China, but they are labeled with a Japanese brand. Why does China have to put up a Japanese brand to make Japanese people make money when it can produce such a good camera? How to Make Domestic Cameras Brand China's Own Brand? This is a question that China enterprises should consider. Manager: What problems should China enterprises pay attention to in the process of building global brands? Don Schultz: As far as media consumption is concerned, many Americans use email, while consumers in China use instant messaging more. In terms of blog, magazine and newspaper consumption, China is also higher than the United States. This study tells us that different countries and consumers have different media consumption behaviors. In the new media era, enterprises must attach importance to the study of consumer behavior, such as consumers buying cars. What are the influencing factors? Is it the influence of TV advertisements or the introduction of friends, or the promotion in the store? Then it is widely disseminated and promoted according to the forms that consumers are interested in. No matter which industry the enterprise is in, when conducting integrated marketing communication, it is necessary to study consumer behavior first. China companies are more enterprises based on supply chain, so they should learn to operate enterprises based on demand chain, that is, from the perspective of consumers, understand their needs and provide products they need. When entering a new market, first ask yourself, is there enough customer data to help us understand this market? In addition, it is the ability to build and manage a strong brand. Brand is the link between enterprises and customers. Brands bring value to enterprises, and this value is increasing year by year. China's manufacturing enterprises should pay attention to brand rather than cost and economies of scale. Manager: Many multinational companies in the west have a long history. China's brand started late, with limited funds and limited time. Where should we start to surpass multinational companies? Don Schultz: There's a saying in China: Sharpening a knife doesn't miss the woodcutter. No brand can become a global brand overnight. It always starts from the local foundation and the market it knows, and goes out step by step until it becomes a global brand. It took 20 years for Japanese manufacturing industry to get rid of the image of junk products and become synonymous with high-quality products. The same is true of Korean companies-15 years ago, Samsung was not as famous as it is now, and Hyundai did not have a good reputation in the automobile industry, but they established an excellent brand image by paying attention to quality, design and continuous efforts. Some enterprises in China often ignore this aspect. A brand must be based on honesty, reliability and trust. A clever idea or idea can only add points to the brand, but there is no way to build an excellent brand. Building a brand doesn't have to cost a lot of money. How much did Google spend on this? How much did Baidu spend for this? However, relying on the leverage of consumer word of mouth has made the brand. We always think that advertising is necessary for brands. In fact, advertising is to give consumers an experience. ZARA never advertises, and by word of mouth, she has also become an international brand. Manager: With the development of Internet, there are more and more channels for people to receive information. Emerging media are constantly developing, and even every consumer has become a self-media What new changes and challenges have this communication situation brought to the brand communication of enterprises? How do enterprises respond? Don Schultz: In traditional marketing, enterprises control everything. They do what they think is important, such as emphasizing how to sell products and services in traditional advertising forms and "pushing" ways, but this matter is not necessarily important to consumers. Enterprises control the market and customers are passive. Give customers enough information and follow the enterprise. This is our traditional marketing method. In the new media era, consumers can find the products they need and are interested in, and they can actively obtain the information they want to know at the time they want and in the way they like, rather than the information that enterprises want to know. Consumers have completely controlled the whole market. Consumers can believe in advertisements or not, and the control lies with consumers, not marketers. Moreover, consumers themselves are creating social networks, and this social network is a closed loop, and enterprises do not understand what this closed loop is like. Therefore, you must know how to interact with consumers and how to establish better contact with them. You must have a dialogue with consumers and let them tell you what they need, instead of the previous forms of publicity and advertising. In this era, when choosing communication media, enterprises must also combine traditional media with new media, and fully consider the differences and irreplaceability of various media. They must be integrated together, not only at the market level, but also at the organizational level. We must learn to put ourselves in the shoes and consider problems from the perspective of consumers rather than ourselves. Manager: Whether Youtube, Twitter or other social networks, all these consumer media are controlled by consumers themselves. So, how can enterprises use these things to establish a better relationship with consumers? Don Schultz: The first thing is to adjust the company's structure, from vertical and linear structure to horizontal structure. In the vertical architecture, customers are put aside and no one pays attention to them. The horizontal structure can promote everyone to work together and organize the internal system of the company. The direction of the organization is to pay more attention to customers and customers rather than what the CEO is thinking. This is a completely different perspective. On this basis, we can use integrated marketing to establish consumer relations. We should start with customers and constantly see how I can bring value to customers, how to understand customers and how to better establish customer relationships. This is an all-round and complete system. Manager: The famous Jobs never thought that customers were gods, and even said, "You don't need to know consumers, they don't know what they need". However, this does not prevent Apple from creating great products. So, under what circumstances, enterprises should choose to trust consumers, and under what circumstances, it is more important to believe in themselves? Don Schultz: Jobs was a genius, the only genius. When consumers enter an Apple store, their clerk will never come to sell anything or ask you what you want to buy, but will tell you how to play. Jobs's philosophy is: look at what consumers want and provide what they need. In fact, this is exactly the same as the theory of integrated marketing. Integrated marketing always starts with consumers. When Apple first started to make a music player, no one thought of this, but Jobs knew that consumers wanted products that could listen to and edit music according to their own preferences, instead of passively listening to music on the radio. Apple saw this demand and satisfied it. Therefore, consumer-oriented is the only rule of integrated marketing. Manager: In the new media era, there are so many carriers of information, and consumers' choices of information carriers are also varied. Does this mean the high cost of integrated marketing? Don Schultz: Before advertising, enterprises should find out why and where to do it. If you don't watch TV, enterprises can't find you through TV advertisements, and it is likely that all the advertisements put on it will be wasted. Therefore, to accurately find this consumer, we must find his favorite media, understand how he uses this media, and put it on accordingly. In addition, we should know which media have the greatest influence on consumers' decision-making. This cost is not too high. There are many ways of low-cost integrated marketing, such as Tencent and Baidu, which all analyze consumers' online records and online rules. It doesn't cost much to buy these analytical data. Manager: Integrated marketing communication is the establishment of various relationships in the marketing process. What influence does the birth of various media and the change of communication situation have on the establishment of these relations? Don Schultz: Among investors, customers and employees, American CEOs are most concerned about how to maximize profits and are only responsible to investors; Japanese companies are most concerned about their employees. At this time, if you pay attention to consumers, you have a chance. The future of the market lies in customers, and mastering customers will master the lifeblood of enterprises. How to be customer-oriented? This is the core of integrated marketing. Of course, if you want to make investors happy, you can't offend employees, but the wallet is in the customer's pocket. If you can't meet the needs of customers, there is no source of income. The emerging media has changed various relationships among stakeholders. The most important thing is to make employees more important, because they can get news and inside information from multiple sources. If marketers still treat new media in the old way, such as treating new social media as TV media, it will definitely not work. Social media is a two-way interactive media, while the information transmitted by TV is one-way-you can publish news, but you can't feed back your news. It is very important for enterprises to make good use of this two-way interaction. Manager: What conditions do enterprises need to successfully implement IMC (Integrated Marketing Communication)? Don Schultz: To successfully implement IMC, products must be produced from the perspective of consumers and oriented by consumers. I made a survey in the United States. Companies that can't implement IMC don't support strong implementation, and even senior leaders don't know who consumers are and what integrated marketing is. To successfully implement integrated marketing communication, the company must turn to consumers, not just the sales department; The top management of the company must vigorously publicize and believe in integrated marketing, and everything is customer-oriented.