Page 162 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

77 INTEGRATE
COMMUNICATIONS

In recent years, the hot topic in marketing has been integrated
marketing communications. Marketers try to ensure that every
message coming from the company is (at least broadly) telling
the same story. This is extremely difficult to achieve in practice—
salespeople say whatever they need to say to make the sale, different
media give different slants on the message, and of course the
company’s employees talk to friends and relatives about the company
and its products sometimes with devastating effect.

One way of coordinating the messages is to use them to direct people
to the corporate website: here the real messages can be set up.

The idea

Nine West Shoes needed a cheap and simple way to direct potential
customers to the company’s website. Getting people to visit a website
about shoes is not easy at the best of times—shoes are not always
the most exciting products, and people are unlikely to go out of their
way to find a site about them.

What Nine West did was to mold the web address into the soles
of the shoes. Thus, when someone wearing Nine West shoes left a
footprint (after stepping in a puddle, for example), the print promoted
the shoes.

Using one medium, especially an innovative one, to direct people
to another one is not new—“As Seen on TV” used to be a popular
message on point-of-sale materials in retail stores. What Nine West
have done is create an innovative way of promoting their website.

100 GREAT MARKETING IDEAS • 153