Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy

The Promotion Mix

  • The promotion mix is the specific blend of advertising, public relations, personal selling, and direct-marketing tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.
  • Major Promotion Tools:
    • Advertising
    • Sales promotion
    • Public relations
    • Personal selling
    • Direct marketing
  • Advertising: Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
    • Broadcast
    • Print
    • Internet
    • Outdoor
  • Sales promotion: Short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.
    • Discounts
    • Coupons
    • Displays
    • Demonstrations
  • Public relations: Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image, and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events.
    • Press releases
    • Sponsorships
    • Special events
    • Web pages
  • Personal selling: The personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
    • Sales presentations
    • Trade shows
    • Incentive programs
  • Direct marketing: Making direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships—by using direct mail, telephone, direct-response television, e-mail, and the Internet to communicate directly with specific consumers.
    • Catalog
    • Telemarketing
    • Kiosks

Integrated Marketing Communications

  • The New Marketing Landscape:
    • Major factors affecting change toward segmented marketing
    • Shift away from mass marketing
    • Improvements in information technology
  • The Shifting Marketing Communications Model:
    • Less broadcasting and more narrowcasting
    • Advertisers are shifting budgets away from network television to more targeted cost- effective, interactive, and engaging media.
  • The Need for Integrated Marketing Communications:
    • Integrated marketing communication is the integration by the company of its communication channels to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its brands.
    • Integrated marketing communication calls for recognizing all contact points (brand contact) where the customer may encounter the company and its brands.

A View of the Communications Process

  • Integrated marketing communication involves identifying the target audience and shaping a well-coordinated promotional program to obtain the desired audience response.
  • Marketers are moving toward viewing communications as managing the customer relationship over time.
  • The Communications Process:
    • Sender
    • Encoding
    • Message
    • Media
    • Decoding
    • Receiver
    • Response
    • Feedback
    • Noise
  • Sender is the party sending the message to another party.
  • Encoding is the process of putting thought into symbolic form.
  • Message is the set of symbols the sender transmits.
  • Media refers to the communications channels through which the message moves from sender to receiver.
  • Decoding is the process by which the receiver assigns meaning to the symbols.
  • Receiver is the party receiving the message sent by another party.
  • Response is the reaction of the receiver after being exposed to the message
  • Feedback is the part of the receiver’s response communicated back to the sender
  • Noise is the unplanned static or distortion during the communication process, which results in the receiver’s getting a different message than the one the sender sent
  • For a message to be effective, the sender’s encoding must mesh with the receiver’s decoding process.
  • Best messages consist of words and other symbols that are familiar to the receiver.
  • Marketers may not share their consumer’s field of experience but must understand the consumer’s field of experience.

Steps in Developing Effective Communication

  • Effective Communication:
    • Identify the target audience
    • Determine the communication objectives
    • Design the message
    • Choose the media
    • Select the message source
    • Collect feedback
  • Identifying the Target Audience:
    • Marketing communications begins with a clear target audience to answer these questions:
      • What will be said
      • How it will be said
      • When it will be said
      • Where it will be said
      • Who will say it
  • Determining the Communications Objectives:
    • Marketers seek a purchase response that result from a consumer decision-making process that includes the stages of buyer readiness.
  • Designing a Message:
    • AIDA Model
      • Get Attention
      • Hold Interest
      • Arouse Desire
      • Obtain Action
  • Designing includes the message content, structure and format.
    • Message content—what to say
    • Message structure—how to say it
    • Message format—through what way to express
  • Message content is an appeal or theme that will produce the desired response.
    • Rational appeal
    • Emotional appeal
    • Moral appeal
  • Rational appeal relates to the audience’s self -interest.
  • Emotional appeal is an attempt to stir up positive or negative emotions to motivate a purchase.
  • Moral appeal is directed at the audience’s sense of right and proper.
  • Choosing Media:
    • Personal communication
    • Non-personal communication
  • Personal Communication:
    • Personal communication involves two or more people communicating directing with each other.
      • Face-to-face
      • Phone
      • Mail
      • E-mail
      • Internet chat
  • Personal communication is effective because it allows personal addressing and feedback.
  • Control of personal communication
    • Company
    • Independent experts
    • Word of mouth
  • Company
    • Salespeople
  • Independent experts
    • Consumer advocates
    • Buying guides
  • Word of mouth
    • Friends
    • Neighbors
    • Family
  • Opinion leaders are people within a reference group who, because of special skills, knowledge, personality, or other characteristics, exerts social influence on others.
  • Buzz marketing involves cultivating opinion leaders and getting them to spread information about a product or service to others in their communities.
  • Non-Personal Communication Channels:
    • Non-personal communication is media that carry messages without personal contact or feedback— including major media, atmospheres, and events—that affect the buyer directly.
  • Major media include print, broadcast, display, and online media.
  • Atmospheres are designed environments that create or reinforce the buyer’s leanings toward buying a product.
  • Events are staged occurrences that communicate messages to target audiences.
    • Press conferences
    • Grand openings
    • Exhibits
    • Public tours
  • Selecting the Message:
    • The message’s impact on the target audience is affected by how the audience views the communicator.
      • Celebrities, e.g. athletes, entertainers
      • Professionals, e.g. health care providers
  • Collecting Feedback:
    • Involves the communicator understanding the effect on the target audience by measuring behavior resulting from the behavior.

Setting the Total Promotion Budget and Mix

  • Setting the Total Promotion Budget:
    • Affordable budget method
    • Percentage-of-sales method
    • Competitive-parity method
    • Objective-and-task method
  • Affordable budget method sets the budget at an affordable level.
    • Ignores the effects of promotion on sales
  • Percentage-of-sales method sets the budget at a certain percentage of current or forecasted sales or unit sales price.
    • Easy to use and helps management think about the relationship between promotion, selling price, and profit per unit
    • Wrongly views sales as the cause than the result of promotion
  • Competitive-parity method sets the budget to match competitor outlays.
    • Represents industry standards
    • Avoids promotion wars
  • Objective-and-task method sets the budget based on what the firm wants to accomplish with promotion and includes
    • Defining promotion objectives
    • Determining tasks to achieve the objectives
    • Estimating costs
  • Objective-and-task method forces management to spell out its assumption about the relationship between outlays and results but is difficult to use.
  • Shaping the Overall Promotion Mix:
    • The Nature of Each Promotion Tool
      • Advertising
      • Personal selling
      • Sales promotion
      • Public relations
      • Direct marketing
  • Advertising reaches masses of geographically dispersed buyers at a low cost per exposure and enables the seller to repeat a message many times.
  • Advertising is impersonal, cannot be directly persuasive as personal selling, and can be expensive.
  • Personal selling is the most effective method at certain stages of the buying process, particularly in building buyers’ preferences, convictions, and actions and developing customer relationships.
  • Sales promotion includes coupons, contests, cents-off deals, and premiums that attract consumer attention and offer strong incentives to purchase. It can be used to dramatize product offers and to boost sagging sales.
  • Public relations is a very believable form of promotion that includes new stories, features, sponsorships, and events.
  • Direct marketing is a non-public, immediate, customized, and interactive promotional tool that includes direct mail, catalogs, telemarketing, and online marketing.
  • Promotion Mix Strategies:
    • Push strategy involves pushing the product to the consumers by inducing channel members to carry the product and promote it to final consumers.
      • Used by B2B companies
    • Pull strategy is when the producer directs its marketing activities toward the final consumers to induce them to buy the product and create demand from channel members.
      • Used by B2C companies
  • Integrating the Promotion Mix: Checklist
    • Analyze trends—internal and external.
    • Audit the pockets of communication spending throughout the organization.
    • Identify all customer touch points for the company and its brands.
    • Team up in communications planning.
    • Create compatible themes, tones, and quality across all communications media.
    • Create performance measures that are shared by all communications elements.
    • Appoint a director responsible for the company’s persuasive communications efforts.

Socially Responsible Marketing Communication

  • Integrating the Promotion Mix: Checklist
    • Communicate openly and honestly with consumers and resellers.
    • Avoid deceptive or false advertising.
    • Avoid bait and switch advertising.
    • Conform to all federal, state, and local regulations.
    • Follow rules of “fair competition.”
    • Do not offer bribes.
    • Do not attempt to obtain competitors’ trade secrets.
    • Do not disparage competitors or their products.