Chapter 18 –Designing and Managing Integrated Marketing Communications

Overview

Marketing communications is one of the four major elements of the company's marketing mix. Marketers must know how to use advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations, and personal selling to communicate the product's existence and value to the target customers.

The communication process itself consists of nine elements: sender, receiver, encoding, decoding, message, media, response, feedback, and noise. Marketers must know how to get through to the target audience in the face of the audience's tendencies toward selective attention, distortion, and recall.

Developing the promotion program involves eight steps. The communicator must first identify the target audience and its characteristics, including the image it carries of the product. Next the communicator has to define the communication objective, whether it is to create awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, or purchase. A message must be designed containing an effective content, structure, format, and source. Then communication channels both personal and nonpersonal must be selected. Next, the total promotion budget must be established. Four common methods are the affordable method, the percentage-of-sales method, the competitive-parity method, and the objective-and-task method.

The promotion budget should e divided among the main promotional tools, as affected by such factors as push-vs.-pull strategy, buyer readiness stage, product life-cycle stage and company market rank. The marketer should then monitor to see how much of the market becomes aware of the product, tries it, and is satisfied in the process. Finally all of the communications effort must be managed and coordinated for consistency, good timing, and cost effectiveness.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

After reading the chapter the student should understand:

CHAPTER OUTLINE:
  1. Introduction - the five major modes of communication (advertising, sales promotion, public relations, personal selling, and direct marketing)
  2. The Communication Process - communications as the management of customer buying processes over time, the nine elements of the communications model, reasons why message may not get through the receiver (selective attention, selective distortion, and selective recall)
  3. Developing Effective Communications
    1. Identifying the Target Audience - image analysis is a major part of audience analysis that entails assessing the audience’s current image of the company, its products, and its competitors. First step is to measure target audience’s knowledge of the subject using a familiarity scale; second step is to determine feelings toward the product using a favorability scale. The specific content of a product’s image is best determined with use of semantic differential (Five steps)
    2. Determining The Communication Objectives - based on seeking of a cognitive, affective, or behavioral response. Assuming the buyer has high involvement with the product category and perceives high differentiation within the category, base objectives on the hierarchy-of-effects model.
    3. Designing the Message
      1. Message Content - choosing an appeal (rational appeal to audience’s self interest, emotional appeal attempt to stir up either positive or negative emotions, moral appeals are directed to the audience’s sense of what is right and proper)
      2. Message Structure - one-sided presentation v. two-sided argument
      3. Message Format - Must be strong, based on headline, copy, "sound", nonverbal clues, color, expression, dress, etc.
      4. Message Source - expertise, trustworthiness and likability
    4. Selecting Communication Channels
      1. Personal Communication Channels - direct
      2. Nonpersonal Communication Channels - indirect (media, atmospheres, events)
    5. Establishing the Total Marketing Communications Budget
      1. Affordable Method
      2. Percentage-of-Sales Method
      3. Competitive-Parity Method
      4. Objective-and-Task Method
  4. Deciding on the Marketing Communications Mix
    1. The Promotional Tools - benefits of each tool (advertising, sales promotion, etc.)
    2. Factors in Setting the Promotion Mix (type of product market, push versus pull strategy, buyer-readiness stage, product-life-cycle stage, company market rank)
    3. Measuring Results
  5. Managing and Coordinating Integrated Marketing Communications ( a concept of marketing communications planning that recognizes the added value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communications disciplines and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency and maximum communications impact through the seamless integration of discrete messages.
  6. Summary