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Benefitting from 360 degree marketing
Introduction
A senior marketing director in a recent
conversion blurted out that while her
marketing budget has increased YoY, the ROI
seems to be elusive. What was bothering her
was the fact the company spends
substantially in curated events managed by
respected analysts, and yet Sales find the
coverage insufficient. While number of
events their company showcased increased
management was not sure what beyond the
local noise could be used to sustain branding.
While such a strategy could have worked
earlier, with increasing internet and mobile
penetration, de-emphasizing the role of social
media does not auger well for any company.
As shown in Figure 1, marketing spend on
various media is spread across both offline
and online media vehicles. In many
developing economies, the print and physical
media still play a dominant role, but the
impact the social media has in attracting and
influencing millennials can’t be wished away.
A good marketing program must blend variety
of offline and online assets shown in Figure 2
to maximize reach and increase brand loyalty.
While online assets may have certain
advantages including high reuse of content,
higher reach at lower cost, offline assets like
events, F2F seminars, etc. provide high
customer contact. A common problem with
most companies is they focus on few
marketing assets and lack an integrated
approach. Some believe in only the physical
networking events and other lean heavily on
social media platforms.
With internet penetration increasing and
mobile adoption driving the customer
behaviour marketing is witnessing major
upheavals. Even established brick-and-mortar
brands cannot just sit back and rely on
traditional marketing channels anymore and
risk losing market share. Many companies
have jumped onto the bandwagon, created
social media accounts on various platforms
including Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter etc. Most outsource online activities
to an agency and hope they would be able to
assimilate their brand strategy and engage
and drive prospective customers. Many
companies have invested in a small internal
marketing team that holds the reins for both
physical and online medium, often confused
and lost in coordinating several activities at
the same time without much of a thought
why the particular activity. Many companies
hope presence in these platforms and isolated
activities in physical space maximise their
brand reach and lead to sales. But very few
actually know if they are leveraging on your
social media marketing efforts correctly.
Several studies across marketing managers
indicate:
1) 50% of marketing budget is wasted
2) Only 34% of feel their content
marketing works
3) 25% had no marketing strategy

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4) 44% had no alignment between
various marketing media
ROI on marketing dollars can be only
improved by 1) exploiting both offline and
online assets in a well-orchestrated manner,
and 2) by tightly aligning internal marketing
teams with external agencies. In this paper,
Browne & Mohan consultants share how
these two objectives can be achieved by
sticking to the basics, understand why
marketing, what unique advantages various
marketing assets offer and intertwine them in
a seamless synchronous way to maximize
marketing reach and revenue growth.
Marketing objectives and marketing assets
Before we look at how to bridge seamlessly
the offline and online marketing assets, lets us
first understand the objectives of marketing
programs and how to attain them. Any
marketing activity is to help consumers
associate with the brand, help differentiate its
offerings and seek higher revenues. There are
four main objectives that are fundamental to
a company’s marketing program are Inform-
Listen-Influence-Advocacy.
The Inform Stage which typically consists of
information and knowledge exchange
amongst the producer and the consumer
groups. Companies use various marketing
assets to communicate to the interest group
their unique existence, product/service
offering set, pricing and other advantages.
The primary focus is to choose media assets
that help reach larger set of consumers. This is
similar to “eyeballs” principle employed in
many online businesses. The objective is
maximise reach at an affordable cost.
Next marketing objective is to listen how the
marketing message is being received by the
target audience. The listening stage stresses
on initiation of conversations with the
identified target audience, identifying the
nature and source of conversations, collection
of valuable suggestions, ideas and feedback
from the current customers. It is extremely
important to know the source of
conversations to gather idea on which media
platforms the prospects or consumers are
currently active and how to engage the
organization’s media resources and strategies
accordingly. For an effective conversation
listening organization requires the dedicated
systems and process at the company level.
Understanding the user behaviour, motives
and expectations from the conversations is
extremely important for an organization
which wants to take future engagement.
Objective of all marketing programs is to
direct the intent to direct and influence the
purchase intent of the consumer towards
their products and services and gain revenues.
Companies use several approaches to drive
influence. They could engage decision
influencers or community heads or celebrities
to endorse their products. Companies also
effectively use third party credible parties
who may be perceived “neutral” such as
academic institutions, analysts and R&D
organizations to canvass for their products.
Awards, citations, sponsored industry events,
directed online community forums are all
effective mediums of influencing consumers.
Smarter companies marketing cost can only
be contained and more effective if they can
outsource inform and influence part of
marketing to external agencies. The objective
is to minimize total costs of managing
disparate activities with highly fragmented
consumers. An effective marketing program
creates converts who would act as
ambassadors, influencers and gatekeepers for
the brand. Advocacy is the final objective is a
evolved marketing plan. The objective is to
enlist willing individuals who would eschew
the role of brand ambassadors and drive
positive word of mouth.
Each marketing asset offers certain natural
advantage at different stages of marketing
objectives as shown in Figure 3. Assets that
have lower cost of creation, bundling and
distribution work best at inform stage. Assets
that are traditionally available to disseminate

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information may also enjoy cost & other
competitive advantage, albeit not sustainable
over long run. Hence, online marketing assets
such as blogs, brochures, online forums enjoy
huge cost advantages in the inform stage.
Incumbent Offline marketing assets such as
newspapers, TV and Radio enjoy competitive
advantages and continue to play a role in
informing customers about products and
services. Social media revolves around
conversations, community, connections and
social networks. Social media encourages
contributions and feedback from the interest
group. For startups and established firms,
social media makes a lot of business sense
because the tools are free and easy to
manage.
While most marketing assets can be useful in
receiving customer feedback, some assets
enjoy certain unique natural advantages over
others. Marketing assets such as online
forums, Face to face meetings allow for
bidirectional exchange of dialogues, iterative
discussions on opinions and high depth of
information that could be exchanges. Hence,
these assets serve as effective feedback
platforms and meet marketing objective
“listening” requirements.
Marketing assets such as curated white
papers, case studies, conferences and
magazine publications are very effective in
directing the customer purchase intentions
and shepherd them to its flock. These assets
allow for experience sharing and position
‘expertise,’ and therefore help the company in
moving branding from product-commodity to
credibility. A key element of social media
marketing assets is the level of involvement of
users or employees in content generation,
community building, etc. The main focus is on
brand reinforcement and effective brand
reputation management by cutting down the
noise around a brand. The noise attenuation
is made possible by representing the
employees as brand defenders. These
marketing assets also allow the company to
deeply engage with the influencers who
contribute in social brand building. These
assets companies allow companies to enable
influencers play a key role as mentors, and
ultimately lead to significant contribution in
engaging with the brand community.
A company’s most tangible form of legitimacy,
probably, comes in the form of direct support
from its customers, supporters and its
admirers. The fact that a company has their
consent and support for its products is a
strong source of legitimacy. Companies gain
legitimacy and from advocacy when their
customers, partners and ecosystem players
endorse and push their products and services.
Endorsements help drive positive word of
mouth and serve as the best form of
advertisement. Third party endorsements
including awards influence all stages of
customer purchase cycle, right from search,
evaluation, negotiation and order. Extent of
reusability of endorsements and flexibility in
their packaging makes marketing assets such
as Analyst case studies, award video’s etc
effective means to lock-in customers.
3600
marketing
Browne & Mohan consultants believe a
company’s marketing program can only be
effective if it judiciously combines all offline
and online marketing assets at its disposal.

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The key to effective marketing lies not just in
extensive meshing of offline and online assets,
but also an embellish strategy of marketing
content. We call this 3600
marketing. This
ensures messaging starts from basic assets
and progresses to high scale assets. Marketing
communications becomes extensive, both
content depth and quality improves with each
of the assets in a scalar form. The advantage
of this is that content development and
curation can happen in stages and stronger
stories, messaging emerge with each insert.
For example, an infographics can be used to
reward the reader with rich insights with high
level cause-effect. Marketing team may start
with an infographic, high on information
density and distilled functionality and
communicate through high imagery. Next
level, a blog, which is used to influence,
informative or thought provoking, may extend
the infographic content. The blog could
contain rich arguments and silver line
conclusion. The content could be further
extended by creating a richer whitepaper
which would help in positioning expertise,
credibility and promote advocacy. Beauty of
the embellish model is that content not only
unfolds in a consistent manner, also all of
them form independent hooks to improve
visibility and customer engagement process is
always on. Similar extensive strategy can also
be used for physical platforms. Companies
realize focus group meetings, followed by
industry forum and curated events including
analyst shows provide improve coverage and
affinity. Browne & Mohan consultants
propose a simple approach, shown in Figure
4, to implement 3600
marketing.
The objective of pursuing 3600
marketing is to
align the offline and online assets, but also
benefit from embellished content strategy.
Start with an ‘As-is’ analysis of all your
marketing efforts. Evaluate the current
budgets, assets deployed, their frequency of
use, customer engagements and impact,
identify the marketing gaps. It could be high
reliance on a particular marketing asset,
ineffective linkages of content within online,
dropping importance of particular assets, etc.
Rework the budget, top 4 marketing goals to
achieve and activities to maximize reach and
brand impact. Next, do quarter-wise and
month-wise plan for various assets and detail
activities. Plan and execute various activities
in each quarter by adopting embellish
strategy. Extend assets from low information
load & low cost to high information load and
costly marketing assets. Ensure the activities
are nicely meshed across both online and
offline environments. Conduct a monthly
review to evaluate the activities conducted
and their outcome. Replan assets and
activities for the consecutive quarters based
on the review to ensure maximum reach and
integration.
Selected Bibliography
Asmussen, Bjoern, et al. "The multi-layered
nature of the internet-based democratization
of brand management." Journal of business
research 66.9 (2013): 1473-1483.

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