传播的新时代—唐 E. 舒尔茨

传播的新时代

    为陈刚教授与沈虹博士的新著—《创意传播管理》一书作序，我感到非常荣幸。他们告诉我，这部著作中的许多思考受到了我与我的同事当年在美国西北大学发展出的整合营销传播（IMC）理论的影响。我们当时的研究成果呈现在另一本专著《整合营销传播》当中。这本出版于1993年的图书是全球第一本关于整合营销传播理论的著作。
    大约在美国出版两年之后，《整合营销传播》一书在中国台湾首次被翻译成中文。在台湾的多家广告营销机构大力推动下，这本书与整合营销传播理论一同被介绍到内地。正是由于这样的机缘，当我于2001年首次访问中国的时候，整合营销传播的理念早已被中国的营销领域所熟知，当时甚至有些中国企业已经在不同层面上运用了整合营销传播理论，并获得成功。中国的营销者们发现，整合营销传播理论重视整体、强调系统的特性，与中国消费者所处的文化环境高度契合。另外，整合营销传播强调任何营销传播都应该且必须以消费者为中心，而不是单纯地强调产品或者营销组织，也很快就得到了中国的营销传播学术界的认同与支持，他们相信整合营销传播代表着营销传播领域的未来方向。
   北京大学的陈刚教授是整合营销传播理论最有力的支持者之一。作为中国广告教育的领军人物，陈刚教授对于整合营销传播理论的支持，为在新兴市场让学界、业界接受这一探索营销传播发展的全新而独特的思路，做出了巨大贡献。正是在陈刚教授等专家和学者的推动下，关于整合营销传播理论的热烈讨论在中国的企业客户、代理公司、媒体以及学术机构之间广泛展开，而且一直持续到了今天。虽然陈刚教授是整合传播营销理论最主要的赞同者之一，但同时，他也属于对其最有洞察的批评家之列。他很快就意识到整合营销传播理论的整体价值，但也注意到其根植于美国文化的方法论，并不能完全照搬到中国市场，相反，它需要与日新月异的中国市场变化相适应。这成为陈刚教授不断思考和研究的问题，并在这个领域，取得了重要的进展。
    2009年在北京举办的American Academy of Advertising Asia Pacific Conference大会上，陈刚教授宣读了他的《新兴市场、共时性竞争和整合营销传播》的论文，陈刚教授认为，中国市场的发展是在产品竞争、渠道竞争、品牌竞争三个层面共同推进的，他把这个特点称为共时性竞争。在欧美等市场，这三个层面是在不同的时间逐渐递进的，表现为一种线性的发展模式，而在中国这种新兴市场，这三个层面在同一个时间段同时存在，共同发展。正像中国创造了独特的市场经济体系一样，中国市场的发展也体现出独特的共时性竞争的特点。因而，也正如中国发展自身的丰富性一样，对中国的同行而言，整合营销传播已经并不是一种很简单的理念或理论，而是被从多个层面解读和应用，并且被不断地创新和完善。这一篇论文以及随后的讨论，改变了我对于整合营销传播理论及其未来在全球发展的方向的看法。因此我想借此机会，对陈刚教授的敏锐洞察，以及他为我深入了解中国以及新兴市场而提供的帮助，致以诚挚的谢意。
    始于对整合营销传播从中国视角的解读，加上其后续的相关研究与拓展，陈刚教授与他当时的学生—现在已经任教并成为同行的沈虹博士等组成的研究团队，共同发展出了“创意传播管理”理论。这也正是读者们即将看到的这本著作。我认为，这本书提供了使得基础性的整合营销传播理论与市场环境和传播环境变化相适应的更加具有实效性的解决方案，因而也有助于整合营销传播理论在高速发展、竞争不断升级的中国市场更加具有操作性和可行性。
在这里我想援引一些背景故事，来帮助读者了解陈刚教授与沈虹博士是如何发展和完善这一营销传播的新理念的。2009年，沈虹正在为她的北京大学博士论文写作做准备。作为她博士论文研究工作的重要环节，沈虹博士在2010年春季学期到美国西北大学的整合营销传播中心访学。在她访美期间我很荣幸地成为了她的指导教师。
    作为她研究的一部分，沈虹在美国对许多执行整合营销传播的客户企业和提供整合营销传播服务的机构进行了访谈，并与美国西北大学整合营销传播专业的学生小组、访问学者积极互动。她将自己完全沉浸在西北大学梅迪尔学院的整合营销传播研究、教学与推广中去。同时，应该强调的是，近期我们在营销传播研究中的一些成果，当然也离不开沈虹博士的积极参与。
    沈虹博士在旅美期间对整合营销传播的感受和体验，作为研究的基础资料，很多都融入了陈刚教授与她所完成的这本全新的营销传播理论著作中。读者在继续阅读本书时就会清晰地发现，从整合营销传播到创意传播管理，是一种极具中国特色的创新发展。
我与沈虹博士曾就当下日益重要的在互动市场环境中的“消费者—营销者”间的协同问题，进行过多次讨论。其中所关注的发生在所有互动市场之中买家与卖家间的协同，是任何希望继续有效的营销传播形式所需要面对的主要转变。沈虹将她在这里的学习所得带回了中国，并把我们之间的讨论与陈刚教授分享，而其中的一些观点就体现在这本著作当中。所以，尽管我未能给本书的章节贡献一字一句，但是我为书中很多智慧的思想实际上得益于我与沈虹之间的诸多讨论交流而感到自豪。
    同时，对我来说最有趣的事情在于，现在我们已经形成了一个有关营销传播理念的完整的轮回。整合营销传播理念最初萌生于美国，随后传播到中国并被中国的同行们接受；如今，创意传播管理由我们的中国同行提出，并又被介绍回到美国与我们分享。而最初诞生于美国的互联网，是创意传播管理的基础，正是互联网，为陈刚教授与沈虹博士等建构新一代营销传播理念提供了平台。换句话说，应用美国技术的中国学者，为我们创造出了全新的营销传播发展、规划与执行理念的框架，而我相信它将能有效地适用于世界上绝大部分的市场发展。
    与单纯地仰仗技术的进步来推动营销传播发展的观点相比，陈刚教授与沈虹博士等建构的是一套基于互联网与相关技术平台，但更为根本且具有人文关怀的系统的营销传播理论。他们之所以能做到这些，是因为他们认为，互联网并非是传统意义上的媒体，而是一种独特的数字生活空间。因而，互联网用户也并不是传统意义上所谓的“目标市场”—营销者想要接触到的一般化的泛化而抽象的消费者群体；而“目标市场”却是超过半个世纪以来美国营销传播理论发展的基础。取而代之的是陈刚教授与沈虹博士的全新理念，他们将每个用户看做是鲜活的个体，即生活者。生活者与环境、相关群体以及其他个体之间有着各种各样的互动行为，同时，这些鲜活的个体也与各种层面的营销传播活动相互关联并产生互动。因此，在互联网这样的数字生活空间，商业机构必须与生活者相互依存才能获得成功。所以，营销者必须将自己定位于为生活者提供所需要的各种服务的供应商，即生活服务者。对日渐明显、清晰的数字时代而言，这是一种颠覆性的、独特并且行之有效的营销传播理念。
    我非常高兴能被邀请为这本由我的两位亲密友人和同行—陈刚教授与沈虹博士—所撰写的激动人心的新书作序。我相信他们的研究代表着未来整合与协同的发展方向，这一探索既能帮助商业机构解决所面对的普遍而根本的问题，又能有助于他们思考如何在特定的市场环境中发展。在数字生活空间之中，只有通过与所有的人和参与者进行分享，才能保证自身的繁荣与发展。而这本书正是把这样的前景呈现在我们面前。
    总之，阅读本书，我们将会了解互联网所带来的互动世界到底发生了什么变化，我们将能了解营销传播能够而且必须如何发展。我相信阅读本书对读者而言将会是一段非常有趣的旅程，这个旅程将由两位优秀的中国学者，也是我的最亲密的两个朋友引领。

唐 E. 舒尔茨
美国西北大学终生荣誉教授
2011年12月

THE NEXT STAGE OF COMMUNICATION

I am very honored to have been asked by Professors Chen and Shen to write the Preface for their new book, Creative Communication Management. They have told me that much of their thinking has been influenced by the concept of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) which my colleagues at Northwestern University in the U.S. and I developed several years ago. The output of our initial work was presented in another book, Integrated Marketing Communications: Putting It Together And Making It Work (Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn, 1993). Published in 1993, that was the first text published on IMC.

About two years after the U.S. publication of the IMC book, it was translated into Chinese in China’s Taiwan. As a result of strong support from the Taipei advertising agency community, the book and IMC traveled to the mainland of China. As a result of that translation, by the time I made my first trip to China in 2001, the concept of IMC was well known. It had even been applied by several Chinese companies with varying levels of success.

Chinese marketing executives found the holistic and circular nature of the IMC concept fit very well with the culture and views of Chinese consumers. In addition, the IMC premise that marketing communication could and should be focused on the consumer, rather than just on the product or the marketing organization, was quickly grasped and supported by the Chinese marketing and communications academic community. They considered IMC to be the future of the entire field of marketing communication.

One of the strongest supporters of concept of Integrated Marketing Communication or IMC was Professor Chen Gang at Peking University. As one of the leading advertising educators in China, Chen’s support of the IMC concept did much to build academic and industry acceptance for this new and different way to think about planning and developing marketing communication, particularly in an emerging market. As a result of Chen’s support, discussions of IMC were widespread among marketers, agencies, the media and academic institutions across China. And, those discussions continue even today.

Clearly, Professor Chen Gang has been one of the strongest advocates for IMC but, he has also been one of its most thoughtful critics. He quickly acknowledged the overall value of the IMC concept but also recognized that the approach, as developed in the United States, could not be totally adopted in China. Instead, it needed to be adapted into the rapidly growing Chinese marketplace. Professor Chen did that, and did it well.

At the American Academy of Advertising Asia Pacific Conference held in Beijing in 2009, Professor Chen presented a working paper titled “Emerging Markets, Synchronous Competition and IMC” (Chen, 2009) during a plenary session devoted to the subject. In that paper/discussion, Chen outlined how the Chinese market had developed in three identifiable phases over time, driven by what he termed “synchronous competition”. Simply put, Chen described China as going through three stages of development. He called the first “Competition in Products”, the second “Competition in Distribution” and the third, “Competition in Brand”. He suggested that China, as it developed the Chinese system of a market economy, was going through all three stages simultaneously. Thus, IMC was not one single concept or theory in China but, like the country itself, it was multi-layered and continuously evolving. That one paper, and that one discussion, changed my concept of IMC and how it likely would develop around the world. Therefore, I would like to publicly thank Professor Chen for that insight and his furthering of my education on China and emerging economies.

From that initial IMC Chinese-view of IMC and Professor Chen’s additional adaptations and developments, he and his then student, now Professor and colleague, Shen Hong developed the concept of “Creative Communication Management”. That’s the text you are now reading. This book, in my view, is the solution to the need to develop an adaptation of the basic IMC concept, and make it practical and possible for use in the rapidly evolving Chinese marketplace.

Some background will help in understanding how and in what ways, Chen and Shen have developed this new approach to marketing communication. In 2009, Professor Shen was developing her dissertation for the Ph.D.degree at Peking University. As part of her preparation for writing the required thesis, Shen spent the spring of the next year visiting the Integrated Marketing Communication Department at Northwestern University in the U.S. It was my good fortune that she asked me to be her mentor during her visit.
As part of her studies, Shen interviewed a number of U.S. IMC practitioners, met with a number of integrated agencies, spent time with IMC student groups and even guest lectured in the Northwestern graduate IMC program. In short, she totally immersed herself in how we were researching, teaching and advocating IMC at Medill at Northwestern. So, we at Northwestern would like to feel part of our approach to marketing and communication came from Shen’s time with us.

The evidence of Shen’s experience with IMC while in the U.S. can be found in much of the thinking which underlies what she and Professor Chen have developed as the new view of marketing communication. It’s an innovative combination of IMC and creative communications, with definite Chinese characteristics. That will become clear when you read the following pages of this Creative Communications Management text.
Doctor Shen and I had several discussions about the increasingly important area of consumer-marketer marketplace negotiation in today’s interactive marketplace. That interface, which now occurs between the buyer and the seller in all interactive marketplaces, is a major change in how all forms of marketing communication must exist. Shen took back to China what she learned here. She shared many of the discussions she and I had with Professor Chen. Some of those concepts have found their way into this text. So, while I wrote none of the words that follow in this book, I take pride in the fact that some of the intellectual contributions to the thinking which will be found in the following pages came from my discussions with Doctor Shen.

What is most interesting to me is that I believe we have now come full circle with many of our marketing communication concepts. The initial idea for IMC was developed in the U.S. and shared and adopted by our Chinese associates. Today, the idea of Creative Communication Management has been developed by our Chinese friends and is being returned and shared with us in the U.S. The internet, which was developed initially in the U.S., is the backbone of the Creative Communication approach. It provides the platform from which Chen and Shen have constructed the next level of marketing communication thinking. In other words, Chinese scholars, using U.S. technology, have provided us with this new approach to marketing communication development, planning and implementation which I believe can be successful in most markets around the world.

Rather than relying on technology to move marketing communication forward, Chen and Shen have used the Internet and the accompanying technologies to create a more basic, humanistic level of marketing communication. They do that by recognizing that the Internet is not a media form in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, the Internet is a unique digital living space. Therefore, Internet users are not traditional “target markets”, the broad generalization of groups the marketer wants to engage, which has been the mainstay of the U.S. approach to marketing communication for more than a half-century. Instead Chen and Shen’s new concept and approach views everyone as living persons, people who interact with the environment, other organizations and other people. And, these living persons interact with and relate to and through all levels of marketing and communication. It is, therefore, in this digital living space of the internet that commercial enterprises must relate to living persons to succeed. Thus, marketers must consider themselves as living service providers….A radical, unique and very useful way of thinking about marketing communication in an increasingly digital world.

I am pleased to have been asked to write the preface for this exciting new text developed by two of my very dear friends and colleagues, Chen Gang and Shen Hong. I believe what they have developed is truly the next step in the development of integration and alignment that all commercial organizations must use in dealing with the radical and in some cases, unique marketplaces, in which we find ourselves today. In a living space, all things must be shared for all persons and entities to survive and prosper. This new book shows that way forward.
So, read on and learn what the new world of interactivity through the Internet will be. Learn about marketing communication can and must be going forward. I think you’ll find the book to be a very interesting journey, led by two very knowledgeable and leading Chinese scholars, and two of my best friends.

Don E. Schultz
Professor Emeritus in Service
Northwestern University
December, 2011