Multi-channel marketing (MCM) is challenging. Get it right and you can create a dynamic and engaging brand experience across multiple touch points and channels; get it wrong and you can damage your brand. Yet even the once aloof luxury brands are now realising that MCM will be the key to marketing success over the coming years.

Back in the early 2000’s, as the dotcom boom turned to bust, the Internet strategists had a simple explanation for why their world was crashing and burning around them: “Of course our brands have a clear Internet strategy”, they wisecracked. “Their Internet strategy is that they will have an Internet strategy.” In other words, virtually no one had any idea what to do about the Internet; they just knew they had to do something.

Black humour for the consultants waiting for their pink slips, but the situation is not so different today with Multi-Channel Marketing (MCM). Everybody talks about MCM, every brand has to at least refer to it on their business plan presentation to corporate management, but in truth very few are actually doing it.

In principle the expanding range of channels empowers brands to engage in a multi-dimensional and increasingly personalised dialogue with their customers at significantly lower cost per transaction, and with the added reward of enhanced brand loyalty. In practice, we find brands too frequently looking confounded by the complexity of the new environment, and then clumsy and out-of-place when they do barge onto the different channels.

A central issue has always been the compatibility of traditionally ‘offline’ brands, particularly the luxury sector, with the free-for-all of the new, user-authored channels. It may be fine for Dell or a budget airline to succeed at MCM, piling the virtual products high and selling them cheap; after all, they’re aiming to do business online, so it’s their home turf. But surely this is no place for a luxury brand? How do you ‘get’ Rolex or Gucci or Chanel when you can’t feel the texture of the glossy paper and sink into the warm depths of those extravagantly staged images that show so little of the product, yet try to say so much about the brand?

That question, with us since the earliest days of the Internet (when Swiss watch companies such as Breitling, for example would mask their websites with dire warnings never to buy their products over the web), came to the fore again recently with the launch of the Financial Times’ www.howtospendit.com site, launched in conjunction with key luxury brands such as Rolex.

Howtospendit takes the FT’s glossy magazine that showcases luxury products for the super-rich and puts it online. Does this reflect a true MCM strategy? Possibly it does, although the foray online is strictly limited and the FT has chosen its territory carefully. Howtospendit’s brief is to ‘translate the voluptuous feel and experience of the glossy magazine to an online environment’ (as announced in the FT). That environment is a website created using new Adobe Flash 10 technology. It is not trying to translate a ‘voluptuous feel and experience’ to the blogosphere or enhance Rolex’s brand value through a tweet.

Whether the Howtospendit initiative succeeds or not, what it does show is the world of luxury finally acknowledging that their customers, even the older ones, have adopted new technology habits which cannot be ignored. Luxury brands may still feel handcuffed by the visual limitations of digital media, yet many of them still invest heavily in creating and building multi-media arts to showcase their wares in their own or in sponsored galleries.

MCM thinking could take the online engagement much further, with the celebrities the luxury brands enlist as brand advocates, for example, synching with their own blogs and participating in specific online forums, social networks, outdoor and traditional platforms to engage with their fans. Once you get started on this line of thinking, the main problem becomes not so much how to find new ways of multiplying contact with potential customers, but rather how to discipline the creative thinking and prevent it spiralling out of control.

Of course it would be easier for luxury to ignore the challenge of MCM and stick with what it knows best: the controlled, one-way environment of ATL print and film advertising and in-store promotions. Yet that world is falling apart as users adopt the new media for their news and entertainment.

And the implications of failing to adapt are stark. To give just one recent statistic as an example in microcosm:

During the Australian Online Retailer Conference held on August 18 2009, Deborah Sharkey, MD Australia of Ebay revealed that:

57% of the AUD$23 billion spent online in Australia in 2008 went offshore (as opposed to only 14% of the 2005 total online retail spend). Her point was that by failing to pick up the gauntlet of online marketing and retailing, Australia’s retailers were haemorrhaging revenues to more aggressive and savvy marketers abroad.

The message at its bluntest is simple: get online or get poor, a point taken to heart by at least 52,000 Australians who, according to Ms Sharkey, currently earn their living by selling on Ebay.

As the most enlightened have discovered, the real hero marketing strategies are the ones that are not bound as though by articles of faith to either online or offline, or to SEO as opposed to email marketing, or to DM as opposed to Social Networks – but to intelligently conceived, symbiotic combinations of the ever-increasing bouquet of media platforms available to them.

The new order is consumer-centric and not product-centric, focusing on driving engagement through the consumer’s channel of choice, funnelling customers subconsciously through the purchase decision cycle and interacting with them at the right time, with the right messaging and offers. That is truly the end goal beyond multi-channel marketing.

Relatively few brands have got there yet, but even the most reactionary seem to have swallowed the bitter pill that they need to. As such, Multi-Channel Marketing has finally come of age and become just that: the use of multiple media channels and formats to create and then manage a total customer experience. That is what we call at Epsilon, Customer Experience Marketing.