Communication

Communication: Process of conveying a message to others

• Source: Person or organization with information to convey

• Message: Information

• Channel of Communication: Means of communication

• Receiver: Consumers who read, hear, or see the message

• Encoding: The process by which the sender transforms an idea into symbols

• Decoding: What the receiver takes away from the communication

Promotional Mix: Blend of promotion tools that the company uses to communicate customer value and build customer relationships. Relative importance varies through the customer journey

• Advertising: Paid form of non-personal presentation

• Sales Promotion: Short-term incentive to encourage purchase or sale of a product or service

• Personal Selling

• Public Relations: Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image, handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events

• Direct/Digital Marketing: Engaging directly with carefully targeted individual consumers

Marketing communications are changing rapidly due to new technologies

• Consumers are better informed and more communications-empowered

  • Less reliance on marketer information

  • Internet & social media are most common to gather and exchange information

• Marketing strategies evolve due to new technologies

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC): Involves the coordination of the company’s communication channels through developing, executing, and assessing

• Planning: Develop the promotion platform

• Implementation: Executing the promotion program

• Evaluation: Assessing the promotion program

Promotion can be used in various ways to generate demand

• Push Promotion: Personal selling to members of the marketing channel with intermediaries pushing products

• Pull Promotions: Selling to customers through advertising or direct to consumer promotions

Advertising

• Types

  • Informative: Carried out in a factual manner, relies solely on goods’ or services’ strengths or features rather than trying to convince customers with emotion; used to introduce new product category

  • Persuasive: Appeals to customers’ emotions; builds selective demand

  • Comparative: Specifically mentions another product as inferior; creates competition through direct comparison

  • Reminder: For mature products to remind people they are available; maintains customer relationships

• Budget

  • Advertising Appropriation: Total amount of money allocated to advertising for a specific product

• Informational/Rational Appeal: Features, competitive advantage, favorable price, news, popularity of a specific product/company

• Emotional Appeal: Functional differentiation is getting increasingly difficult, so appealing to people’s emotions is getting more important

  • Humor

    • Advantages:

      • Attracts and holds attention

      • Positive mood

      • Increase feelings

      • Distracts the consumer from counter-arguing against the message

      • Best for low-involvement products

    • Drawbacks:

      • Distracting from brand and attributes

      • Difficult to produce and may be too subtle

      • Tendency to lose effectiveness when seen or heard repeatedly