A New Chord
Can marketing be synchronised like an orchestra? Author Chintamani Rao draws on his long years of experience in the advertising industry to suggest that an integrated marketing communications programme can indeed be synchronised like music. Making Marketing Music is about how marketing communication works, when it doesn’t, and how ‘marketing music’ is made.
The author emphasises that marketing being about people, the marketing loop is closed only when your target does what you want it to do. The purpose of marketing communications, therefore, is not just to convey something to people, but to get them to perform an action. For that, one’s marketing communications tools must work in concert and in synergy. We must ask ourselves what we want the consumer to do, how we can induce them to do it, what comes in the way of their doing it and what we need to do about it, suggests Rao.
He then offers some real life examples. Marketing management today seems overly obsessed with digital platforms, less perhaps from a conviction about their role and function, than fear of being left out. But digital platforms are just another means of connecting with the audience. There is no reason to believe that people who post on your Facebook page are any more valuable as customers than those who don’t. The author recommends that we see and understand digital platforms in the overall communications context and use them for what they do best.
The slim manual for the marketing man avoids academic jargon and is easy to read. It reaches out to those interested in marketing and marketing communication, CMOs or young managers, creative directors or account executives, students or teachers of marketing. The book is packed with examples, case studies and stories from India and a great many from the author’s own experience, which bring the underlying principles alive. In this writer’s opinion, Rao’s book does succeed in clearing many clouds around marketing.
