Integrated Marketing Communications Flashcards
Define Marketing Communications
Kotler, et al (2008) define marketing communications as the means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers about the products and brands they sell. In a sense, marketing communications represent the voice of the company and its brands.
What can marketing communications do?
Marketing communications can:
• help firms establish a dialogue and build relationships with consumers and
• strengthen customer loyalty, and thus contribute to customer equity.
• Help consumers learn about the product or the company
• allow companies to link their brands to other people, places, events, brands, experiences, feelings, and things.
• contribute to brand equity by establishing the brand in memory and creating a brand image.
• drive sales and even affect shareholder value.
Kotler et al, 2008
What are the types of marketing communications?
- Advertising . Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor.
- Sales promotion . Short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or a service.
- Personal selling . Personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
- Public relations . Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favourable publicity; building up a good corporate image; and handling or heading off unfavourable rumours, stories and events.
- Direct marketing . Direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.
Kotler et al, 2008
What are the changes in marketing communications?
• First, consumers are changing.
○ In this digital, wireless age, they are better informed and more communications empowered.
○ they can use the Internet and other technologies to find information on their own.
○ They can connect more easily with other consumers to exchange brand-related information or even create their own marketing messages.
• Second, marketing strategies are changing. As mass markets have fragmented, marketers are shifting away from mass marketing. Developing focused marketing programmes designed to build closer relationships with customers in more narrowly defined micro-markets.
• Finally, sweeping advances in communications technology are causing remarkable changes in the ways in which companies and customers communicate with each other. Many modern technologies including iPods, smartphones and the wealth of things that relate to the internet have come into being.
Kotler et al, 2008
Define Integrated Marketing Communications
Holm, 2006 mentioned Smith et al’s 1999 definition of Integrated Marketing Communications
They distinguish three definitions:
(1) Management and control of all market communications.
(2) Ensuring that the brand positioning, personality and messages are delivered synergistically across every element of communication and are delivered from a single consistent strategy.
(3) The strategic analysis, choice, implementation and control of all elements of marketing communications which efficiently (best use of resources), economically (minimum costs) and effectively (maximum results) influence transactions between an organization and its existing and potential customers, consumers and clients.
IMC, discuss
The company carefully integrates its many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent and compelling message about its organisation and its brands.
IMC calls for recognising all touch-points where the customer may encounter the company and its brands.
The company’s goal should be to deliver a consistent and positive message to each contact.
The integrated marketing communications strategy - what does it aim to do?
Consistent, clear and compelling company and brand messages through advertising, personal selling, public relations, direct marketing and sales promotion.
Discuss the Communication Process
Must understand the communication process before choosing the medias to communicate through.
The sender designs the message, they encode the message, they send it through the media where it is vulnerable to noise, it is then decoded/ received by the receiver. The receiver sends a response, where it is vulnerable to noise, the sender of the original message then receives the feedback.
What are the Steps in Developing Effective Communications (the first five are the basics)?
- Identify Target Audience
- Determine Objectives
- Design Communications
- Select Channels
- Establish Budget
- Decide on Media Mix
- Measure Results
- Manage IMC
Talk about the identification of the target market
There are the deciders and the influencers. They must understand the potential buyers and current users. They can be profiled in terms of market segments, usage and loyalty and brand knowledge.
Define the terms required in the definition of objectives.
- Category Need—Establishing a product or service category as necessary to remove or satisfy a perceived discrepancy between a current motivational state and a desired motivational state.
- Brand Awareness—Fostering the consumer’s ability to recognize or recall the brand within the category, in sufficient detail to make a purchase.
- Brand Attitude—Helping consumers evaluate the brand’s perceived ability to meet a currently relevant need.
- Brand Purchase Intention—Moving consumers to decide to purchase the brand or take purchase-related action.
What things are required when considering designing communications?
Message strategy: buyers expected one of four types of reward from a product: rational, sensory, social, or ego satisfaction. 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 are the way marketers translate their messages into a specific communication. They can be classified as either an informational appeal that elaborates on product or service attributes or benefits or a transformational appeal that elaborates on a nonproduct-related benefit or image.
Message source: messages delivered by attractive or popular sources can achieve higher attention and recall, or who should say it is very important.
When you are discussing the selection of channels - there are two types, personal and non-personal, discuss them
Personal communications channels let two or more persons communicate face-to-face or person-to-audience through a phone, surface email, or e-mail. They derive their effectiveness from individualized presentation and feedback and include direct and interactive marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and personal selling.
Nonpersonal channels are communications directed to more than one person and include advertising, sales promotions, events and experiences, and public relations.
What are the four methods of establishing budgets?
Competitive-parity method: set budget to achieve share-of-voice parity with competitors.
Affordable method: set budget at what the company can afford.
Percentage-of-sales method: set expenditures at a specified percentage of current or anticipated sales or of the sales price.
Objective-and-task method: develop budgets by defining specific objectives, determining the tasks that must be performed to achieve these objectives, and estimating the costs of performing them. The sum of these costs is the proposed communication budget.
What are the characteristics of advertising?
Pervasive, Amplified, Control
