Customer Reviews

IMC, The Next Generation : Five Steps For Delivering Value and Measuring Financial Returns

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This book has been a bible of sorts for me over the past few years. Anyone trying to figure out what's going on in social media and the changing nature of the buyer, should take a read through this first.

Some of the areas may be a bit hard to grasp, but the methodology makes sense, and the Schultz team breaks it down into a step-by-step process that will make your marketing programs measurable (if you follow their advice).

This book is not for the marketing hobbyist, but will be well worth it for anyone in business or marketing that cares about creating long-term relationships with their customers (and measuring the progress).

IMC The Next Generation is a very good overview of what Integrated Marketing and Communication is and how IMC can be implemented into a business. The writing itself is about as dry and uninspiring as central Texas in August, but the ideas are there in a fair amount of detail. It also includes some of the real life problems a marketer may come across when trying to implement an IMC program into an existing business.

Full disclosure: I have not finished the book, so I can't speak for anything past chapter 8, but a couple of things to be aware of. There are some very critical errors in some of the charts and formulas and I have not received an answer from either the publisher or the authors to let me know exactly what the correction would be. These errors could skew any assumptions on the value of customers very significantly, so it would be nice to know if the mistake was in the formula itself or how they used it in the example given.

Starting on page 110, they give a formula for determining a customer brand value then pose a scenario using quantity estimations from research and existing customer data. Then they fill in the formula from those estimations. But it seems they don't use the same numbers when doing the final math.

P x BR x SOP x CM = CBV

In the example they say Penetration (P) is the number (percentage) of customers they have of the total number of customers. (40,000 out of 100,000) 40% or .4

Then when they do the math, they use the number (2) in the penetration (P) slot. Where does the 2 come from?

Then they say the buying rate averages 12 cartridges per printer x 2 printers per customer per year. That's 24 cartridges per customer per year, yet when they enter the number into BR number of the formula, they use 12 instead of 24.

The SOP (.65) and the gross margin ($6.50) numbers seem correct.

But plugging the numbers into the formula, the difference in average annual value per customer is significant when you substitute what should be the right numbers.

2 x 12 x .65 x 6.5 = $101.40 numbers they used for the calculation)

compared to

.4 x 24 x .65 x 6.5 = $40.56 numbers I think they should have used)

Then on pages 113-114 the figures between Exhibit 5.2 and the explanation of groups B & C seem to be swapped.

Had to read this book for a promotions class. A great deal of information and incite especially looking at todays markets. Takes away the notion of the 4 P's and brings in the idea of SIVA.

pretty new book, and it arrived much quicker than what I thought, and it was shipped for free!