Holistic and Sustainable Marketing

Holistic marketing is about creating and developing integrated strategies for brands, campaigns and sales tactics that consider the entire life-cycle of a product or service, crossing departmental boundaries within organisations. It takes a 360 degree view of all the elements of a business; including the elements of the business the customer doesn't usually see as well all customer-facing media, (traditional, digital and social channels) to create strong, consistent and powerful multi-platform marketing narratives.

A marketing strategy that is developed by thinking about the business as a whole, its place in the broader economy and society, and in the lives of its customers. It attempts to develop and maintain multiple perspectives on the company’s commercial activities. (source)

A holistic marketing concept is based on the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognize their breadth and inter-dependencies. Holistic marketing recognizes that ‘everything matters’ with marketing and that a broad, integrated perspective is necessary to attain the best solution. Four main components of holistic marketing are: relationship marketing, integrated marketing,  internal marketing, and socially responsible marketing. (source)

It seems to be an approach wherein a marketer has the option to involve as many approaches to market the product as possible and integrate them together in order to create a overall, wholesome approach towards marketing. To understand how many approaches there can be to marketing, I came across this interesting link which is almost exhaustive to the point of tiredness about how many types of marketing there can ever be: http://chiefmartec.com/2010/12/131-different-kinds-of-marketing/

So imagine all of these types (definition wise more than one together) put together and working on the same product's marketing. Immense potential! The 'Dumb Ways to Die' campaign to increase awareness towards railway accidents can be considered a very wholesome example of holistic approach to a campaign. 

Another very interesting diagram I came across in my relatively holistic research is shown below:

Though the figure adheres to digital and traditional approaches only, imagine all the types of marketing in the link mentioned above at the roots of the tree that is the product-that is the scope of making product awareness we are looking at here!

Mc'Donalds thrives on TV, Newspaper, Word of Mouth, Digital in form of email, offers and social networking. Integration of even more options into this will definitely help the brand (not by making bolder the already strong footprint in the industry) but there is a definite scope of making the brand more interesting using the multiple options! Not because the brand is not interesting enough already-only because a different approach always acts as a distinct advantage over competition.

I usually tell people that the Mc'Chicken combo meal is totally worth the 180 rupees I pay. And I have also involved myself in some direct marketing by getting a couple of extra burgers a couple of times for people who trashed my claims. That was only a little something one can do for a brand you have really grown to appreciate by now..Wait-what?!