Integrated marketing is old hat. As a concept, it was being practiced and preached by PR pros like Harold Burson and Tom Harris long before the term became popular in business schools, sales conferences and even magazines.
Integrated marketing is old hat. As a concept, it was being
practiced and preached by PR pros like Harold Burson and Tom Harris long
before the term became popular in business schools, sales conferences
and even magazines.
But one trend that is relatively new is the employment of PR
professionals to lead the integration. In ’The integrated marketing
puzzle’ (p28) we look at the experience of pros at a number of blue chip
companies: John Kiker at United Airlines, Matt Gonring at Arthur
Andersen, Don Spetner at SunAmerica, Fred Hill at Chase Manhattan, Dick
Badler at Unisys and Kevin Ramundo at BF Goodrich. All of these
high-flying pros have recently added marketing and advertising to their
job titles or auspices. This is the truest sign of all that PR is taken
seriously.
The rise to power has always come with a fight. Gonring admits it took
five years to persuade the CEO that integrated marketing made sense. To
do this, Gonring showed him books and magazine articles on the topic and
introduced him to people already doing these kinds of jobs, as well as
the dean of Northwestern’s Business School - a classic piece of third
party endorsement.
Of course, as PR takes on more responsibility, it puts an added onus on
pros to know their ’stuff’: to understand (and study?) marketing on a
deeper level. But at the same time, if PR can be promoted as the ladder
to the top of the marketing department, it may help to attract
much-needed talent to the PR community.
