3 Marketing Mindsets That Must Change for Companies to Successfully Integrate

July 6, 2011 By Heather Fletcher

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Sure, there are all these nifty tools out there to make life easier, but many companies are still struggling with how to institutionalize change—especially when it comes to integration. Businesses wanting to become the customer-centric ideal need to have communications cross channels, embedded with the data necessary to allow cross-trained personnel to nimbly respond.

To do that, many of the old ways of thinking need to go by the wayside, say Dave Frankland, vice president and principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based research company Forrester Research; Clare Hart, CEO at Omaha, Neb.-based marketing product and services provider Infogroup; Paul Magill, a principal at New York-based management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.; and Dana L. Wade, consultant in the Marketing Officer Practice at Chicago-based executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

The quartet spoke in New York during DMA's All for One Summit session "Is Your Organization Up to the Challenge of Integration?" on June 21. They provided these insights on how businesses can organize in order to integrate:

1. Personnel: To properly integrate, companies need transformative leaders rather than operational ones, Wade says.

Magill adds that that vision means marketing will "orchestrate customer engagement across the entire company." While that doesn't mean marketing will control decisions, it does mean the organization should allocate decision rights to cross-trained personnel.

One marketer that took steps to implement this thinking is San Francisco-based clothing retailer Gap, Frankland says. One department would enter the meeting of another and "shut up," he says. After simply listening and waiting a week, the guests would then provide suggestions to the departments they visited.