By Katy Chase

The authors of Kellogg on Integrated Marketing (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) might advise you to round up 10-year-olds to test-play a nascent video game system, or else frequent an online bulletin board to ask customers’ opinions, or recruit hip-hop fans to poster empty walls. Such techniques, they say, can advance the integrated marketing goal of approaching customers from many angles.

The text, edited by Kellogg School Professors Dawn Iacobucci and Bobby J. Calder, frames marketing as a range of contacts with consumers, eclipsing earlier models that focused on the product or the retailer. In a networked market where consumers shop the world at the click of a mouse, marketers must compete on something they can create, manage and enhance over time. Increasingly, that something is the brand.

“Integrated marketing is about achieving a unifying theme across contact points,” says Calder, the Charles H. Kellstadt Distinguished Professor of Marketing and professor of psychology. The authors, drawn from both Kellogg and Northwestern University’s Integrated Marketing and Communications program, provide detailed examples to introduce concepts and strategies.

One chapter outlines the principles of viral marketing and the practical applications of “buzz” — powerful contacts between networks of opinion leaders. By understanding how these networks function and rewarding their participants, marketers can reach customers most effectively. Viral marketing propels the evolution of shared culture and multiplies the effectiveness of traditional marketing campaigns.

“Often people respond best to something that seems to be going on around them,” says Calder.

With unprecedented amounts of data flooding companies, capturing the customer’s mindset might seem easy. But falling prey to what the authors call “data sirens” without a plan can leave marketers feeling rootless.

“If you don’t know how to analyze data to get a picture of your customers, then it’s useless,” says Iacobucci. Integrating data sources across the company guards against wasted time and redundancies, she notes.

But for an integrated marketing effort to truly work, it must permeate the company, with everyone from engineers to accountants focusing on the customer. In the current dismal economic climate, persuading a CEO to invest in a new marketing plan is a challenge — one that firms must meet.