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    Integrated Marketing Communications: Brand Alignment, Advertising Platforms, and Customer Messaging

    Are you talking to yourself?

    Take an honest look at your marketing communications. Chances are you spend more time talking about your company and its products than about why your customers should care. Maybe you’ve filled your advertising with overused, me-too adjectives that plunge it into a sea of sameness. Or maybe you’ve failed to connect your communications into an integrated framework, causing prospects to receive mixed messages.

    It’s time to change that.

    During this three-day course, you will immerse yourself in a mind-opening effort to bring together the left-brained, business-planning side of marketing with the right-brained creative side. How? Trust our team of experts to bring you up to speed. The team includes corporate managers who demand business acumen, as well as “creative dudes” who exude inspiration. You will even experience creative improvisation with the “creative dude” on the last day.

    During this course, you will learn to:

    Meaningfully report marketing productivity

    CEOs, CFOs, and investors are demanding clearer links between marketing communications and results. Learn short-term and long-term measures to better align advertising with business expectations.

    Build bulletproof campaigns for considered-purchase products

    While many products are purchased routinely or on impulse, many others (such as B2B) require serious consideration on the part of customers, and often involve multiple influencers. During the course, you’ll explore some of the unique challenges and approaches for promoting these complex and complicated products.

    Frame the anatomy of a big idea

    Different skills are required to generate, evaluate, and implement creative ideas. Regardless of your role(s) in the process, you’ll gain tips, checklists, and a process to do it better…and help other people improve their skills as well. With this systematic approach, you can dare to deviate from the status quo without losing your ability to uncover the steak behind the sizzle. You’ll overcome the commodity trap while maintaining authenticity.

    Leverage multiple tools of IMC

    The components of integrated marketing communications are numerous and provide a comprehensive 360° brand platform. You will learn from our experts with first-hand experience that websites, social media, and experiential marketing such as events and trade shows, sales support collateral, traditional advertising, direct marketing, and public relations should all contribute to customer message management.

    Who should attend?

    This course is for individuals who pilot the development of advertising and communications activities in their firms, including those who work through external advertising agencies or internal departments:

    • Communications managers/directors/specialists
    • Advertising managers/directors
    • Brand/product managers
    • Marketing managers/directors

    Day 1: The Big Picture

    As part of the Wisconsin School of Business, we never lose sight of the need to integrate marketing communications into the “big picture.”

    Connecting marketing communications with the rest of the company

    • Corporate brand alignment
    • Alignment with executive ROI and business expectations
    • Connecting long- and short-term goals

    The strategic integrated communications process

    • Communication differences for impulse versus considered purchases
    • Defining a step-by-step process of integration
    • Evaluating results at various levels

    Day 2: Expanding the Tools of IMC

    Once strategy is in place, the next step is to define and evaluate the various platforms and media to reach customers.

    Platforms for integration

    • Choosing the right platforms
    • Content marketing and thought leadership
    • Weaving the Web and other IMC tools into a cohesive “tapestry”

    Experiential marketing and public relations

    • Using events and sponsorships to connect with customers
    • The pros and cons of trade show attendance
    • Linking social media with event marketing

    Day 3: Customer Message Management

    The platforms from the second day are the “buckets” into which you insert your messages. Be sure you have the absolute best messages you can create.

    Creating powerful ideas

    • Use PitchPerfect™ message strategy to find your most powerful message
    • 100 emergency creative-idea generators
    • Review and improve creative work without demotivating your creative team

    Guerrilla marketing

    • New, unusual, and inexpensive ways to touch your target audience
    • A proven group improvisational brainstorming technique to unleash fresh ideas
    • Tactics, checklists, worksheets, and "learning by doing"

    Barry Callen

    Barry Callen has spent the last 30 years creating strategies and marketing communications for hundreds of different businesses nationwide, from Coca-Cola and Shell to Famous Footwear and Wachovia Bank. Consumer, B2B, technology, association, start-up, and non-profit clients have invested just under half a billion dollars in ads in all media that he has either created or creative-directed. He invented the PitchPerfect™ message strategy process for finding the most powerful thing to say and the Namedrop™ process for creating persuasive, "ownable" names.

    Paul Gibler

    Paul J. Gibler is a digital brand strategist and principal consultant with ConnectingDots, a firm he founded in 2000. ConnectingDots provides clients with strategic marketing and communications consulting to attract and retain customers using multi-channel marketing strategies. Paul is also the digital media publisher for In Business, a regional business media company in Madison, Wisconsin. Paul has 30+ years of corporate marketing, communications, and e-commerce management experience and has had consulting roles with organizations in a wide range of B2B and B2C industry sectors: pharmaceuticals, medical devices, financial services, biotechnology, retailing, medical services, telecommunications, publishing, higher education, and e-commerce. His corporate background includes stints in marketing and communications management roles with Promega, Ohmeda (now part of GE Health Care), CUNA Mutual Group, and Anaquest (a pharmaceutical company).

    Linda Gorchels

    As part of the Executive Education faculty for the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Linda Gorchels is responsible for the financial performance of and long-term strategy for the marketing program. She had previous strategy responsibility in the insurance, publishing, and robotics industries, and has provided strategy consulting or training to such organizations as Trane Commercial Systems, Kerry Group, University of Wisconsin-Extension and CUNA Service Group. Gorchels has been published in the Journal of International Marketing, the Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, the Journal of Contemporary Business Issues, and Industrial Marketing Management. She is co-author of The Manager’s Guide to Distribution Channels, and is author of The Product Manager’s Handbook and The Product Manager’s Field Guide.

    Christopher Schell

    Christopher H. Schell is the managing director of the Madison office of Nelson-Schmidt, Inc., a full-service marketing communications agency with offices in Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. During his 25+-year career in marketing and advertising, Chris has led the strategic planning, brand development, and product launch efforts for dozens of organizations. He has extensive experience with a wide variety of business-to-business and business-to-consumer organizations across such diverse industries as banking, water filtration, building products, retail, and consumer packaged goods. Chris brings both agency and client-side experience to his leadership role.