One of my favorite quotes: “If you cheated during the dark workouts of the morning, you’ll be found out under the bright lights.” — Joe Frazier

Smokin’ Joe is saying that you can’t just waltz into the ring with a quick wit, charm, and good intentions — you have to have the substance to back it up.  (Or, at least, I can’t ever seem to get by that way…)

It underscores that other great quote, about genius being 99% perspiration.

Consider this as well: It takes 10,000 hours of work to master a given discipline.  Any discipline.  (Malcolm Gladwell expounds on this view of genius at the New Yorker’s “Stories from the Near Future” conference in 2007.)

Think about that for a minute — it turns the nature of genius on its head.  It says that a relatively smart person, one willing to work really hard at something, can eventually master that thing.  It doesn’t necessarily require in-born ability.  Nurture trumps nature.

I think we all take it as a truism — that it’s hard work that makes a person (or a brand) great. Having a good idea (the inspiration) is actually, counterintuitively, the easy part. It’s much tougher work to figure out how to make that idea live and work in the real world.

How does this apply to marketing?

We work in a creative business.  Ideas are our stock and trade.  But sometimes too much credence is paid to the so-called “Big Idea.”

It’s not that a Big Idea (or creative idea, or marketing platform, or whatever it is you call it) isn’t important.  It is.

But the Big Idea is akin to the 1% inspiration — it’s just the beginning of the story.  The real sexy comes when we bring that idea to life and make it walk and talk, make it interact with the regular folks like you and me who are going to buy and use the brand in question.

Sexy is the 99% perspiration. Sexy is the process.

All of which to say, integrated marketing communications (IMC) is first and foremost a process.  IMC is not an output — we don’t deliver an IMC by the end of a project. IMC is about how we work.

IMC is getting all the different silos of your organization, all the agencies, and all the other various stakeholders — most of whom have slightly or wildly different agendas and priorities — aligned and pulling in the same direction.

It’s about orchestrating all the pieces of communications that your brand creates (and after all, everything communicates, right?) so they collectively create something that is greater than their individual pieces, that creates a holistic experience for the consumer.

As with so many terms and buzzwords, we all probably have a different definition of and experience with IMC.  But here’s what I know: True IMC is a process — it is the road work that lets us shine under the bright lights.

[x-posted from House of Naked]