Connections to other marketing and business disciplines and tools

Integrated marketing is a strategy, deployment of which is leading to the interconnection or evolution of a number of contemporary management disciplines. For example, it incorporates advanced Positioning (marketing), brand, brand management and corporate identity management objectives.

It is also associated with a number of other business tools/methods, with a keen interest in breaking down the barriers between them, while providing tools or extensions to support their implementation:

• Business Strategy and the Business Model, with IM operating as a differentiation strategy focusing and exploiting the gearing in the business model
• Lean[32], which is an advanced approach to process and organisation quality improvement pioneered by Toyota and drawing on the techniques of W. Edwards Deming and originally applied to lean manufacturing. The lean approach aims to integrate and enhance the entire organisational value stream towards the elimination of waste and the creation and distribution of value to customers. Integrated marketing practitioners can apply this methodology while adding value to lean deployment by enhancing decisions about what constitutes value and supporting broader organisational integration, e.g. in organisational culture.
• CRM, which aims to manage contact relationships with customers. Integrated marketing supports and deploys CRM/customer management just as it does with IMC.
• Knowledge management, systems thinking and Organizational learning strategies are a collection of techniques associated with such thinkers as Peter Senge and Reg Revans. Integrated marketing is a systemic discipline with a substantial interest in knowledge sharing across the organisation.
• Internal marketing, organizational culture management and organisation development. These disciplines are all involved in developing the organisation and the people within the organisation in the way that they connect to the organisation strategy and purposes, collaborate, work and make decisions.
• IM tools help new product development (NPD) initiatives create differentiated value experiences, and apply and develop services marketing practice.
• IM tools help to focus Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and other performance management (PM) methods be emphasising differentiated, non-generic aspects of the organisation’s evaluation regime
• IM tools are extremely useful in mergers and acquisition, assisting in the development of fit. • OODA concepts of team operation and deployment. These ideas, which were developed by Col John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force, encourage agile local decision-making within a framing purpose.