Holistic Marketing, which integrates marketing factors throughout the company

In 2014, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) stated that ‘It’s clear that “marketing” is no longer a discrete entity (and woe to the company whose marketing is still siloed) but now extends throughout the firm, tapping virtually every function.’

（Arons, Driest and Weed, 2014: https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-ultimate-marketing-machine）

And here it is noted that the organisational structure of the marketing department has remained largely unchanged.

If you look at the marketing departments of some of the most common B2B businesses, you will find that some of them have stopped at the role of a single department in sales activities.

Chart of sales activity flows (e.g. B2B SaaS)

Chart of the Role of Corporate Marketing (B2B SaaS)

Some common challenges in this stove-piped organisation are,

• Inconsistency in the organisation’s appeal.
• Lack of coordination between departments (didn’t know this kind of development had been done, customer needs are not shared).
• The role of marketing is not recognised and understood in the organisation.
• Do not know their customers well. Appealing to what they want to show.
• In-house communication and training is not well developed, and people rely on the proposals of outsourced agencies (they don’t know better, but they keep nodding their heads).

These are the kinds of things that are likely to happen.

As companies struggle to improve their marketing approach and results, holistic marketing has become one of the most popular concepts in recent years, and an increasing number of companies are adopting it.

Holistic Marketing concept

What is Holistic Marketing: a strategy and concept that moves marketing beyond the confines of the marketing department to a company-wide role for all business functions across the organisation. This helps all marketing activities to work together and provide a clear and consistent customer experience.

Under this concept, traditional marketing falls under ‘integrated marketing’ and ‘performance marketing’ in the sense that it focuses on measures and measures their effectiveness. What about the other elements?

Holistic marketing develops from the traditional view of marketing as an independent operation. In other words, we see marketing as company-wide and focus on the integration of various strategies and channels.

These are some of the key characteristics of this approach, including

• Having a company-wide common goal: by setting each department and its employees on achieving a common goal, everyone involved is expected to understand their role in achieving it and work towards its achievement.
• Increased efficiency: because all activities are aligned with objectives, collaboration is encouraged and teams are facilitated to manage resources – people, time and money – as well as risks and opportunities more efficiently.
• Consistency: integrated efforts enable seamless and consistent experiences for customers across all marketing channels. This is therefore expected to result in higher user satisfaction and brand loyalty.

It is therefore considered a competitive advantage when all departments and resources work to achieve a single goal.

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