The concept of holistic marketing involves bringing together all the marketing channels and departments within a company to create a seamless and cohesive customer experience to improve overall success. It aims to create a unified brand image across all customer touchpoints and marketing channels.
The holistic marketing concept is a part of the series on concepts of marketing and it can be defined as a marketing strategy that considers the business as a whole and not as an entity with various parts. According to the holistic marketing concept, even if a business is made up of various departments, the departments have to come together to project a positive & united business image in the minds of the customer.
Table of Contents
What Is Holistic Marketing?
The holistic marketing concept views a business as a unified entity, with all its different parts working together towards a common goal. The holistic approach seeks to create synergy across all the different components of marketing such as advertising, public relations, sales, operations, and customer service.
This approach acknowledges that the collective impact of the business is greater than that of its individual parts. As a result, all marketing strategies and activities about the business should be consistent with its common goal and objective. This means that all the different departments in the company should have a good understanding of how their decisions and actions could affect other parts of the business.
What are the key Features of a Holistic Marketing Strategy?
The holistic marketing philosophy comprises three main features or elements, which are the common goal, aligned activities, and integrated activities. Let’s look at each of these features in more detail –
- Common Goal: Holistic marketing focuses on creating a shared goal that all stakeholders can strive to meet. Everyone involved in the process must understand their part in achieving a common objective.
- Aligned Activities: All activities involved in a holistic marketing strategy should be aligned towards the same goal. This includes things like messages, products or services, customer segments, channels, and tactics.
- Integrated Activities: Holistic marketing focuses on integrating all the activities involved in a marketing strategy. This means that everything needs to be connected and working together in harmony towards a common goal.
So, these are the key components of holistic marketing that you need to pay heed to while creating a holistic marketing process.
How Holistic Marketing Concept Works
The holistic marketing concept involves strategically expanding marketing beyond the marketing department to encompass a role in the overall enterprise-wide strategy for all business functions.
An organization will have different departments like sales and marketing, accounting and finance, R&D and product development, and finally HR and operations. Thus, if you want to implement a holistic marketing concept in your organization, you need to ensure that R&D and product development take the feedback from marketing and sales to launch the product which is most likely to attract customers.
On the other hand, they need to work closely with accounting and finance to find out the exact budget for the project. Sales and marketing need to communicate to HR the right kind of people that they need, and finally, admin and operations need to devise a plan to retain these people.
Thus, in the above manner, you get the right product at the right price with the right profits. Along with this, you get the right people who will market your product in the right manner.
If you do all these things, you are sure to get the right customer to your doorstep. This is the complete essence of the holistic marketing concept. By doing the right things together as an organization, your product and brand stand a far better chance of being successful than compared to these elements working individually without any holistic vision.
Today, the customer mindset is changing. Wealth is becoming lesser and debt is high. Thus customer purchases are being made after lots of thinking. Customers search offline as well as online for the right product and have good knowledge of the product before they purchase. Likely, the customer has already made a purchase decision even before he enters the showroom. Thus holistic marketing concept is needed at this hour to ensure that the customer chooses your product over everyone else.
A key driver of Holistic marketing is marketing communications. The job of marketing communications is to send the right message to the target group. By approaching various customer contact points, a uniform message can be sent to the customer. This consistency is likely to raise confidence in the customer for your company thereby raising the brand image.
Here is a video by Marketing91 on the Holistic marketing concept.
Key Holistic Marketing Concepts
The holistic marketing approach is based on the following five principles –
1) Internal Marketing
Marketing between all the departments in an organization. Internal marketing treats employees as important stakeholders in the company and its success, developing a holistic approach to marketing.
2) Relationship Marketing
Building a better relationship with your customers, internal as well as end customers is beneficial for holistic marketing.
3) Performance Marketing
Driving the sales and revenue growth of an organization holistically by reducing costs and increasing sales. The holistic performance marketing activities include campaigns, promotions, and targeted direct marketing initiatives.
4) Integrated Marketing
Products, services, and marketing should work hand in hand toward to growth of the organization. Holistic marketing recognizes the need for an integrated perspective that takes into account all of the marketing pieces.
5) Societal Marketing
Socially responsible marketing aims to address the needs of society as a whole. This approach is rooted in the belief that a business is a constituent of society and must contribute to it. Corporate social responsibility is an example of this.
Holistic Marketing Structure
The holistic marketing structure can be divided into three primary stages –
Analysis
During the analysis stage, your business aims to understand your customer base better by examining factors such as their age, income, marital status, profession, hobbies, likes, and dislikes. It is crucial to take into account your company’s values and available resources at this point to ensure that your objectives align with the intended brand image.
Strategy creation
In the holistic marketing structure, the second step is to develop a strategy. Now that you’ve completed the analysis, it’s time to utilize the gathered information to develop a marketing plan that effectively connects with your customers and delivers value by incorporating suitable themes, products, services, and messaging.
Delivery
The delivery stage is where you provide value to your customers through marketing efforts. For example, you might want to launch a campaign on social media or create promotional materials such as brochures or flyers. Additionally, you could run events and activities to engage with customers and encourage them to purchase your products/services. To succeed, it’s important to maintain positive relationships with customers and employees, while effectively managing both internal and external resources.
Example of Holistic Marketing
Samsung is an example of Holistic marketing where the products are developed keeping the customer in mind, The showrooms are branded properly, the customer service is polite and the service is fast.
Samsung pays attention to customer needs when developing its products. They create branded showrooms and provide fast, polite customer service.
Samsung incorporates Kotler and Keller’s principles to apply holistic marketing concepts. Its internal marketing involves marketing within various departments of the company. Internal marketing is the practice of treating employees as internal customers. Samsung has successfully created a self-driven and competent workforce that understands the importance of customer satisfaction. The company emphasizes maintaining harmony among various marketing functions and departments.
Samsung emphasizes relationship marketing by establishing positive connections with both internal stakeholders and external customers. By utilizing an integrated marketing approach incorporating performance marketing, Samsung has successfully reduced costs and increased positive outcomes, leading to overall revenue and sales growth.
Holistic Marketing FAQs
1) What Is the difference between Holistic Marketing and Market Segmentation?
The concept of holistic marketing centers around finding common goals in a market to unify them together. On the other hand, market segmentation is the practice of dividing a total target market into distinct subsets of consumers, each with similar needs and wants.
2) What Are the Benefits of Holistic Marketing?
The primary benefit of holistic marketing is that it allows a company to create and maintain an integrated view of its customers, which can lead to more effective and efficient targeting. Additionally, holistic marketing offers more flexibility in terms of strategy and tactics as it is not limited to specific subsets of the target market.
3) What are the different dimensions of holistic marketing?
Holistic marketing comprises three key elements: a shared goal, aligned activities, and integrated activities.
Liked this post? Check out the complete series on Marketing
pravin says
Very useful information about the marketing.
Akim says
Good day Thank you for a very rich information
Can you please write something about:
How to implement holistic marketing in the company? and, what changes can be done?
Tanbin says
Very nice about Holistic marketing
kaveer dabogi says
pls tel mi mor abt holistic mkt concept
shuvo says
Is there any short definition of holistic concept of marketing???
nikesh says
it can be define as a marketing concept that consider business as a whole ,not entity having various different parts , as per the holistic concept the business is made up of various different parts ,the departments have come together protect the positive and united image in the minds of customer, this concept involves to ensure that the customer will buy their product rather than of competitor.
Saagar Trivedi says
can you give names of the companies following this concept?
Hitesh Bhasin says
Hello Sagar, Well most top companies nowadays recognise that holistic marketing is the way to go. So most consumer durable companies, or companies where services are required will be following the holistic marketing concept. They have to, to be successful, as in the day of internet, if the brand is weak anywhere, it gets public very soon.
saman says
can u plz give me some more example of holistic markting?
Niluka says
Please send me the more example of Holistic Marketing concept .
What is the suitable comments for the brand or organization improvemnts.
munashe says
i need to know examples of companies using the marketing concept in africa
Sheu says
Econet. It has been the leading the telecommunications industry for quite some time in Zimbabwe to be specific.
Antonia Kasimia says
thank you for the information about holistic marketing, but can u please provide the example of the element of holistic marketing, and how to implement them in a business
eric says
This is helping me alot continue by eazy e
Vanita Pareek says
Thanks for such a rich information in easy language.. but can u please define in depth about its components.
Rejuan azam fakir says
Can u plz give me a example of holisting marketing
kefankoifan says
well judged and pointed about holistic marketing topic but needs references to further studied
Krishna jaiswal says
Explanation is really helpful and Better to understand… ?
Jyoti says
Can u give some other examples of holistic marketing concept
Sharon says
Help me to describe the holistic marketing concept showing how a company can apply it
Sheba Ongaki says
thanks for the explanation. what are the theories of holistic marketing please.