DESIGNING AND MANAGING INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Marketing communications - The means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind
consumers about the products and brands they sell.

Marketing Communications Mix

1. Advertising—Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services
by an identified sponsor via:

 print media (newspapers and magazines)

 broadcast media (radio and television)
 network media (telephone, cable, satellite, wireless)
 electronic media (audiotape, videotape, videodisk, CD-ROM, Web page)
 display media (billboards, signs, posters)

2. Sales promotion—A variety of short-term incentives to encourage trial or purchase of a product or

service including:

 consumer promotions (such as samples, coupons, and premiums)

 trade promotions (such as advertising and display allowances)
 business and sales force promotions (contests for sales reps)

3. Events and experiences—Company-sponsored activities and programs designed to create daily or

special brand-related interactions with consumers, including sports, arts, entertainment, and cause
events as well as less formal activities.

4. Public relations and publicity—A variety of programs directed internally to employees of the company
or externally to consumers, other firms, the government, and media to promote or protect a company’s
image or its individual product communications.

5. Online and social media marketing—Online activities and programs designed to engage customers or
prospects and directly or indirectly raise awareness, improve image, or elicit sales of products and
services.

6. Mobile marketing—A special form of online marketing that places communications on consumer’s cell
phones, smart phones, or tablets.

7. Direct and database marketing—Use of mail, telephone, fax, e-mail, or Internet to communicate
directly with or solicit response or dialogue from specific customers and prospects.

8. Personal selling—Face-to-face interaction with one or more prospective purchasers for the purpose of
making presentations, answering questions, and procuring orders.

The communications process models

a. Macromodel of the communications process

b. Micromodel of consumer responses

Micromodels of marketing communications concentrate on consumers’ specific responses to

communications. Figure 19.2 summarizes four classic response hierarchy models. All these models
assume the buyer passes through cognitive, affective, and behavioral stages in that order.
Elements in Communications Process

The illustration shows a macromodel with nine key factors in effective communication. 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 in the system is noise, random and competing messages that may interfere with the intended
communication.

Developing Effective Communications

1. Identify the target audience

The process must start with a clear target audience in mind: potential
buyers of the company’s products, current users, deciders, or
influencers, as well as individuals, groups, particular publics, or the
general public. The target audience is a critical influence on the
communicator’s decisions about what to say, how, when, where, and to
whom.

2. Set the Communications Objectives

a. Establish need for category—Establishing a product or service

category as necessary for removing or satisfying a perceived
discrepancy between a current motivational state and a desired
motivational state.
b. Build brand awareness—Fostering the consumer’s ability to
recognize or recall the brand in sufficient detail to make a
purchase.
c. Build brand attitude—Helping consumers evaluate the brand’s
perceived ability to meet a currently relevant need.
d. Influence brand purchase intention—Moving consumers to
decide to purchase the brand or take purchase-related action.
3. Design the Communications

Formulating the communications to achieve the desired response requires answering three questions:

 what to say (message strategy)

 how to say it (creative strategy)
 who should say it (message source)

a. Message Strategy

In selecting 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. Some of
these appeals or ideas may relate directly to product or service performance (the quality,
economy, or value of the brand); others may relate to more extrinsic considerations (the brand
as being contemporary, popular, or traditional).

b. Creative Strategy

Communications effectiveness depends on how well a message is expressed as well as on its

content. If a communication is ineffective, it may mean the wrong message was used or the right
one was poorly expressed. Creative strategies are the way marketers translate their messages
into a specific communication. We can broadly classify them as either informational or
transformational appeals. An informational appeal elaborates on product or service attributes or
benefits. A transformational appeal elaborates on a nonproduct-related benefit or image.

c. Message Source

Research has shown that the source’s credibility is crucial to a message’s acceptance. The three
most often identified sources of credibility are expertise, trustworthiness, and likability. Expertise
is the specialized knowledge the communicator possesses to back the claim. Trustworthiness
describes how objective and honest the source is perceived to be. Friends are trusted more than
strangers or salespeople, and people who are not paid to endorse a product are viewed as more
trustworthy than people who are paid. Likability describes the source’s attractiveness, measured
in terms of candor, humor, and naturalness.

4. Select the communications channels

a. Personal communications channels let two or more persons communicate face to face or
person to audience through a phone, surface mail, or e-mail. They derive their effectiveness
from individualized presentation and feedback and include direct marketing, personal selling,
and word of mouth.

b. Nonpersonal communications channels are communications directed to more than one

person and include advertising, sales promotions, events and experiences, and public relations.

Integration of Communications Channels Although personal communication is often more

effective than mass communication, mass media might be the major means of stimulating it.
Mass communications affect personal attitudes and behavior through a two-step process. Ideas
often first flow from radio, television, and print to opinion leaders or consumers highly engaged
with media and then from these influencers to less media-involved population groups.

5. Establish the Marketing Communications Budget

four common methods: the affordable method, the percentage-of-sales method, the competitive-parity
method, and the objective-and-task method.

Affordable Method Some companies set the communications budget at what they think they can afford.

Percentage-of-Sales Method Some companies set communication expenditures at a specified

percentage of current or anticipated sales or of the sales price.

Competitive-Parity Method Some companies set their communications budgets to achieve share-of-
voice parity with competitors.
Objective-and-Task Method The most defensible approach, the objective-and-task method, calls upon
marketers to develop communications budgets by defining specific objectives, identifying 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 communications budget.

Selecting the Marketing Communications Mix

• Advertising
• Sales promotion
• Events and experiences
• Public relations and publicity
• Online and social media marketing
• Mobile marketing
• Direct and database marketing
• Sales force
6. Measuring Communication Results

After implementing the communications plan, the communications director must measure its impact.
Members of the target audience are asked 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 the company. The communicator should also collect
behavioral measures of audience response, such as how many people bought the product, liked it, and
talked to others about it.

7. Managing Integrated Marketing Communications

When done well, this planning process evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communications
disciplines and combines them seamlessly to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum impact of
messages. The wide range of communication tools, messages, and audiences available to marketers
makes it imperative that companies move toward integrated marketing communications. They must
adopt a 360-degree view of consumers to fully understand all the different ways communications can
affect behavior.

Integrated marketing communications (IMC)

“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”

Coordinating media & implementing IMC

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.
1. Coverage. Coverage is the proportion of the audience reached by each communication option
employed as well as the amount of overlap among those options.
2. Contribution. Contribution is the inherent ability of a marketing communication to create the desired
response and communication effects from consumers in the absence of exposure to any other
communication option.
3. Commonality. Commonality is the extent to which common associations are reinforced across
communication options; that is, the extent to which different communication options share the same
meaning.
4. Complementarity. Communication options are often more effective when used in tandem.
Complementarity relates to the extent to which different associations and linkages are emphasized
across communication options.
5. Conformability. In any integrated communication program, the message will be new to some
consumers and not to others. Conformability refers to the extent to which a marketing communication
option works for such different groups of consumers.
6. Cost. Marketers must evaluate marketing communications on all these criteria against their cost to
arrive at the most effective and most efficient communications program.