Designing and Managing Integrated Marketing Communications

Marketing communications are the means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers -- directly or indirectly - about the products and brands they sell. They represent the voice of the company and its brands and help the firm establish a dialogue and build relationship with consumers. They can contribute to brand equity -- by establishing the brand in memory and creating a brand image -- as well as strengthen customer loyalty, drive sales, and even affect shareholder value.

The Changing Marketing Communications Environment

Technology and other factors have profoundly changed the way consumers process communications, and even whether they choose to process them at all. Commercial clutter is rampant. Marketing communications in almost every medium and form have been on the rise, and some consumers feel they are increasingly invasive. Therefore, marketers must be creative in using technology without intruding in consumers' lives.

Marketing Communications, Brand Equity and Sales

The marketing communications mix consists of eight major modes of communication:

1. Advertising -- Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
2. Sales promotion -- A variety of short-term incentives to encourage trial or purchase of a product or service.
3. Events and experiences -- Company-sponsored activities and programs designed to create brand-related interactions.
4. Public relations and publicity -- Programs directed internally or externally to promote or protect a company's image or its individual product communciations.
5. Direct marketing -- Use of mail, telephone, fax, e-mail, or Internet to communicate directly with or solicit response or dialogue from specific customers and prospects.
6. Interactive marketing -- Online activities and programs to engage customers or prospects and directly or indirectly raise awareness, improve image, or elicit sales.
7. Word-of-mouth marketing -- People-to-people oral, written, or electronic communications that relate to the merits or experiences of purchasing or using products or services.
8. Personal selling -- Face-to-face interaction with one or more prospective purchasers for the purpose of making presentations, answering questions, and procuring orders.

Communications Process Models

Marketers should understand the fundamental elements of effective communications. Two models are useful: a macromodel and micromodel. Two represent the major parties -- sender and receiver. Two represent the major tools -- message and media. Four represent major communication functions -- encoding, decoding, response, and feedback. The last element is noise, random and competing messages that may interfere with the intended communication.

 

Fig. Elements in the Communication Process

Developing Effective Communications

Developing effective communications requires eight steps. The basics are

1. Identifying the target audience -- potential buyers of the company's products, current users, deciders, or influencers, and individuals, groups, particular publics, or the general public.
2. Determining the objectives -- category need, brand awareness, brand attitude, brand purchase intention.
3. Designing the communications -- message strategy (management searches for appeals, themes, or ideas that will tie in to the brand positioning and help establish points-of-parity or points-of-difference), creative strategy (the way marketers translate their messages into a specific communication) and message source (messages delivered by attractive or popular sources can achieve higher attention and recall, which is why advertisers often use celebrities as spokespeople).
4. Selecting the channels -- means to carry the message becomes more difficult as channels of communication become more fragmented and cluttered.
5. Establishing the budget -- industries and companies vary considerably in how much they spend on marketing communications. Expenditures might be 40 percent to 45 percent of sales in the cosmetics industry, but only 5 percent to 10 percent in the industrial-equipment industry, with company-to-company variations.
6. Deciding on the media mix -- companies must allocate the marketing communications budget over the eight major modes of communication: advertising, sales promotion, public relations and publicity, events and experiences, direct marketing, interactive marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and the sales force.
7. Measuring the results -- after implementing the communications plan, the company must measure its impact by asking members of the target audience whether they recognize or recall the message, how many times they saw it,what points they recall, how they felt about the message, and what are their previous and current attitudes toward the product and company.
8. Managing integrated marketing communications (IMC) -- defines as "a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time." This planning process evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communications disciplines -- and skillfully combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum impact through the seamless integration of messages.

Coordinating Media

Media coordination can occur across and within media types, but marketers should combine personal and nonpersonal communications channels through multiple-vehicle, multiple-stage campaigns to achieve maximum impact and increase message reach and impact. Many companies are coordinating their online and offline communications activities.

Implementing IMC

Integrated marketing communications can produce stronger message consistency and help build brand equity and create greater sales impact. It gives someone the responsibility -- where none existed before -- to unify brand images and messages through thousands of company activities. IMC should improve the company's ability to reach the right customers with the right messages at the right time and place.

 Summary

Marketing communications are the means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers -- directly or indirectly - about the products and brands they sell. They represent the voice of the company and its brands and help the firm establish a dialogue and build relationship with consumers. Technology and other factors have profoundly changed the way consumers process communications, and even whether they choose to process them at all. Commercial clutter is rampant. Marketing communications in almost every medium and form have been on the rise, and some consumers feel they are increasingly invasive. Therefore, marketers must be creative in using technology without intruding in consumers' lives.They can contribute to brand equity -- by establishing the brand in memory and creating a brand image -- as well as strengthen customer loyalty, drive sales, and even affect shareholder value. Integrated marketing communications can produce stronger message consistency and help build brand equity and create greater sales impact. It gives someone the responsibility -- where none existed before -- to unify brand images and messages through thousands of company activities. IMC should improve the company's ability to reach the right customers with the right messages at the right time and place.

Personal Point of View

The most crucial fact for me is the intent of the message the marketer wants to send out to the target segment carries a company's image, product and brand value. After being carefully evaluated the messages, we can emphasis on the type of the media that we are going to use to reach out the target segment. These days, reaching out to the target media is a lot easier than before with the improved and developed technologies.