Holistic Marketing:

Holistic marketing is about giving consumers what they really want. It aims for a substantial enlargement in the kinds of value which can be delivered through market mechanisms.

What you pay for The simplistic way of thinking about a purchase is that the purchasor hands over some money to the seller and receives in exchange some thing or some service. Economic Efficiency Economic efficiency is about delivering the required products or services at the lowest acheivable cost, and that's what free market economics is focussed on. Purchase Criteria For a market to deliver efficiency in this narrow sense purchase decisions must be determined by price, consumers must seek best value for money.

Marketing Tricks This doesn't happen. You can sell a car as a status symbol, you can sell christmas cards to support charity. Of course the economic theorist can squirm, and try to hold the line by defining the product in terms of the reasons for purchase. What your money does What you buy with your money is by no means the whole story. Your purchase may contribute to global pollution, or may help the economy of a third world country. You don't generally have the faintest clue what the total impact of your purchase decision is.

Total Impact Marketing Holistic marketing based on controlling and selling the total impact. You identify something important that could sway purchase decisions, call it a side-issue. e.g. ecology, education, poverty, war. You then set about producing marketable goods and services in such a way as to optimise impact on the target side issue, as well as competitive price and quality. Then you market your products using the side issue.

Transparent Marketing:

Create customer trust and loyalty by giving them total transparency of how their money is spent and what it does.

Value Chain Transparency To do Holistic marketing you need to have transparency down the value chain which produces (and sells) the goods you market. Otherwise you can't maximise impact on the target issues.

Delivered Transparency To secure the trust of the consumer when you sell your goods on total impact you need to deliver the transparency through to the consumer, and to third parties.

No Commercial Confidentiality Transparency and secrecy don't go together. To market holistically you must compete by market position or by special capabilities, not by use of secret methods or sources which obscure total impact.

Utopian Marketing:

While holistic marketing may sell specifics, utopian marketing puts together and sells an articulated broad vision for the future of the universe.

Single Issue Weakness Single issue holistic marketing may leave the customer wondering whether maximising total impact on the single issue (say ecology) causes adverse impact on other issues he cares about (maybe poverty).

Broad Spectrum Holistics To overcome this holistic branding will be pushed into considering the total picture. The best present day analogue are perhaps ethical investments.

Utopian Vision So now we arrive at Utopian Marketing which competes in the marketplace by putting forward a vision of the future and maximising the total impact of customer spend on realising that vision.

Virtual Brands:

A virtual brand is a brand whose primary purpose is not to sell some physical product, but which is associated with an idea or vision.

Open Branding:

"Open" intended here in a similar sense to that in "Open Source". i.e. not quite public domain, but free use for all. An open brand has specified purposes and standards and can be used freely by anyone who shares the purposes and adheres to the standards.

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© created 1998/10/6 modified 1998/10/16