10 – Integrated Marketing Communications

Introduction

The goal of communication is to influence individual groups and organisations to promote exchanges by informing and convincing one or more audiences to adopt a company’s products and/or services.

The marketing manager must communicate and promote the final product to consumers through numerous communication channels. He must ensure that all channels and techniques of communication convey a consistent message about the firm’s product or service. The concept of ‘integrated marketing communication’ first appeared in management literature about twenty years ago. A marketing communication strategy must be developed to achieve the organisation’s competitive position. This class will teach you how to design a marketing communications programme and what integrated marketing communication entails.

10.1 Marketing Communication

Marketing communications is one of the company’s four primary marketing mix components. Marketers must understand how to communicate the existence and value of a product to target customers through advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations, and personal selling.

The communication process has nine components: sender, receiver, encoding, decoding, message, media, reaction, feedback, and noise. Marketers must understand how to reach their target audience despite the public’s proclivity for selective attention, distortion, and memory.

The marketing budget should be allocated among the primary promotional instruments based on characteristics such as push-versus-pull approach, buyer readiness stage, product life-cycle stage, and company market rank. The marketer should then track how much of the market becomes aware of the product, tries it, and is satisfied. Finally, all communication efforts must be controlled and coordinated to ensure uniformity, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness.

10.1.1 What is promotion?

Modern marketing requires more than creating a good product, pricing it attractively, and making it available to target buyers. Companies must also connect with their customers, and the content and manner in which they do so should not be left to chance. For most businesses, the question is not whether to communicate but how much to spend and how to communicate.

“Promotion is the coordination of a seller’s intention to establish channels of information and persuasion to aid the selling of goods/services or the adoption of a concept.”

“It encompasses all activities aimed at developing and driving demand.”

We are all exposed to many promotional techniques in our daily lives that seek to communicate something to us.

10.1.2 Why Promotion?

Promotion performs three critical functions: it informs, persuades, and reminds prospective buyers about the company and its products. Finally, by utilising all three in various ways, the firm attempts to influence consumer behaviour to meet its objectives: purchasing its products/services.

10.2 Marketing Communication Mix

The promotional mix refers to a company’s complete marketing communications strategy. It is a precise combination of advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing methods that a firm employs to achieve its marketing goals.

10.2.1 Elements of the Promotional Mix

Advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, public relations and publicity, and direct marketing are the key components of the marketing communications mix (also known as the promotion mix). Each component has its own set of characteristics and prices.

Advertising: Advertising is any paid type of non-personal mass communication through multiple media used by a recognised sponsor to market and promote products, services, and ideas, among other things.

Advertising can be incredibly cost-effective because it can reach a large population at a low cost per person and can be repeated numerous times. Movement, sights, sound, and colour are all used in TV advertising. A firm might try to improve its image and that of its brand by using celebrity endorsers in advertisements that appear in various media.

TV advertising is expensive in terms of the actual target demographic reached. TV commercials are often relatively brief in providing important information to the audience. Advertising rarely offers immediate feedback, and quantifying its impact on sales is challenging. Advertising clutter in practically all media reduces the ability of advertising to gain consumer attention.

Sales Promotion: According to the Council of Sales Promotion Agencies, “sales promotion is a marketing discipline that employs a variety of incentive techniques to structure sales-related programmes targeted to customers, trade, and/or sales levels that generate a specific, measurable action or response for a product or service.”

Examples include free samples, discounts, rebates, coupons, contests and sweepstakes, premiums, scratch cards, exchange offers, early bird prizes, and various trade arrangements.

All such offers typically involve limitations, such as an offer expiry date or a limited number of products. Sales promotions are designed to enhance immediate sales, increase support within the marketer’s sales team, or acquire the backing of corporate product resellers.

Personal Selling: Personal selling is a paid face-to-face communication that tries to inform and persuade prospects and customers to buy items or services or adopt thoughts about issues. It entails more targeted communication addressed to one or more people.

Personal selling is used by insurance firms, Eureka Forbes, and some beauty brands, among others.

Personal selling is the most effective and expensive part of the promotion mix. It gives instant feedback, allowing businesses to fine-tune their sales messaging to impact buyers significantly. Personal selling assists salespeople in determining and responding to consumers’ information demands and interpreting body language.

Public Relations and Publicity: Public relations is a broad set of communication activities used to establish and maintain positive relationships with employees, shareholders, suppliers, the media, educators, potential investors, financial institutions, government agencies and officials, and society. These activities include annual reports, brochures, event sponsorship, and sponsorship of various programmes beneficial to society.

Publicity is a public relations tool. It is non-personal mass communication, yet the benefiting organisation does not pay for the media space or time. It is a news story about a company, its products, or its operations. News releases, press conferences, and feature pieces are standard publicity methods.

Unpleasant conditions resulting from unpleasant events may cause an organisation to receive adverse public reactions. Companies have policies and procedures to help manage public relations concerns and minimise the adverse effects of such circumstances, resulting in unfavourable publicity.

Direct marketing is the practice of selling products directly to clients without the use of channel members. It is a technique in which businesses engage directly with their target customers to produce a reaction or transaction. The answer may be an enquiry, a purchase, or even a vote. Direct marketing employs a variety of direct-response mediums, including direct mail, telephone, interactive television, print, and the Internet. Direct marketers use these media to carry out the communication process.

Most businesses use traditional promotion mix elements to sell products through intermediaries; however, many companies also use direct marketing to approach clients directly and get instant behavioural responses.

Example: Assume you own a company that sells autos, such as cars, trucks, vans, and SUVs. You have a current database of consumers who have previously purchased from you, and you know who your clients are – who bought a car, who bought a truck, and so on. You next create specific communications for each segment of that database. That is an example of direct marketing.

10.2.2 Selection of Promotional Mix

Every organisation’s promotion mix varies. Regardless of the aspect of the chosen promotion mix or combination, it attempts to enlighten, convince, or nudge customers closer to purchasing. Consumers can rely on word-of-mouth communication from personal sources, depending on the sort of customer and the type of product.

Product Characteristics: Advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and public relations are all part of the non-durable consumer product promotion mix. Many other products, such as computers that both individual consumers and industrial customers utilise, receive advertising, sales promotion, and personal selling. Many consumers of durable products, such as home appliances, automobiles, tractors, and homes, rely on advertising and individual marketing. Personal selling is primarily used for industrial products such as aircraft, heavy earth-moving, and construction equipment.

Another factor to consider is the stage of the product’s life cycle. Advertising and publicity are the most cost-effective at the initial stage. Advertising and public relations are effective methods for raising awareness. Personal selling is quite beneficial in increasing consumer understanding and acquiring distribution reach. Sales promotion can lead to a trial during the early stages of the life cycle. During the growth and maturity stages of consumer items, a strong emphasis on advertising is required, and in some circumstances, sales promotion is used. During these stages, industrial products frequently necessitate personal selling and sales advertising. Firms often reduce promotional support, particularly advertising, during the decline stage.

Market Characteristics: This is especially true for industrial products. Promotional monies are allocated in priority order to personal selling, advertising, sales promotion, and public relations. Personal selling is more cost-effective if company buyers are only situated in specific geographic areas and are significant buyers. In order of priority, companies operating in consumer markets invest more cash in sales promotion, advertising, personal selling, and public relations. Personal selling is generally more appropriate for high-involvement, expensive, complex, and risky products.

Pull and Push Strategies: Promotion mix options are also influenced by the promotion approach chosen. In the case of a pull approach, a marketer directs communications to customers to generate strong consumer demand for the product or service. This is performed mainly through advertising and sales promotion. This encourages customers to inquire about the product through resellers. To purchase things, retailers resort to wholesalers or the manufacturer. By building demand at the consumer level, this technique seeks to pull items down via the channel. This method is appropriate for solid and high-involvement brands, where consumers see high differentiation between brands and make their brand choices before entering the store.

The manufacturer advertises the product solely to the next institution along the marketing channel with a push strategy. Each channel member promotes to the channel members below them in the chain. Personal selling and trade sales promotions are typically used in this method to encourage resellers to stock the product and sell it to consumers. In some circumstances, retailers pass on a portion of the benefit to customers to clear out the product as soon as possible. When brand loyalty is low, customers are aware of brand benefits, and purchase decisions are made in-store, the push method is appropriate.

10.2.3 Promotion is an Act of Communication

1. “communication” is derived from the Latin word “COMMON.” As a result, it has come to signify sharing anything of everyday use.
2. Marketing communications are persuasive since they influence consumer behaviour, favouring the firm’s goods. These persuading communications are referred to as “PROMOTION” and are one of the four Ps of the marketing mix.
3. Modern marketing necessitates more than just creating an excellent product, pricing it right, and making it easily accessible to the buyer. A corporation must build an efficient communication and promotion strategy to go beyond “walk-in” sales.
4. Persuasive communication occurs when a communicator carefully crafts his communications to have a calculated impact on a target audience’s attitude and/or behaviour.

A study of ‘Marketing Communication’ studies marketing’s promotion role.

10.2.4 Objectives of Promotion

1. Increase sales
2. Increase market share
3. Increase brand loyalty
4. To create product uniqueness in the minds of customers

10.3 Communication Process

A communication model includes nine aspects, and the marketer must understand these fundamental principles to communicate effectively. The sender and receiver are the two persons involved in a communication process; message and media are communication instruments, and the key communication functions are encoding, decoding, response, and feedback.

A basic Model of Communication

10.3.1 Elements of Communication Process

1. Originator, sender, or communicator
2. Coding (putting the thought or idea in symbolic form)
3. The Message (the set of symbols for transmission)
4. Media (the path that the message takes from the Sender to the Receiver)
5. Decoding (assigning meanings to the symbols transmitted by the sender)
6. Recipient, audience, or destination
7. Reaction (the set of reactions that the receiver has after having been exposed to the message)
8. Feedback

10.3.2 Communication Process—A Quick Overview of Promotional Decisions Integrated Marketing Communications

The sender’s goal is to get his or her message to the receiver. However, the intended message may not be received for one of three reasons:

1. Focused concentration
2. Selective distortion (individuals may twist the message to hear what they want). Receivers have predetermined attitudes; they will listen to what is consistent with their belief system).
3. Selective recollection

Promotional Decisions

The following promotional choices must be made:

1. Determine the target audience: The audience could consist of:

• Current users; or
• Potential users.
• Prospective users
• Influencers
• Decider

After determining the target audience, the Communicator must make two critical decisions:

1. What should be said to them?
2. When and where should it be said?

Given the target audience, the communicator must determine many audience characteristics, such as:

1. Audience attitudes about the company and its product and attitudes regarding competitors.
2. Cognitive processes of audiences (how the intended audience processes incoming information: “People differ in their cognitive complexity as a function of education and intelligence”)
3. After selecting the target audience, the communicator must carefully consider what responses are desired from the audience.

2. What messages should be sent?

1. 1. The ultimate (desired) response is a purchase, the targeted change in the buyer’s behaviour, although this is the end consequence of a lengthy consumer decision-making process.
   2. Before purchasing a product, the consumer goes through several stages.
   3. The marketing communicator should be aware of the buyer’s preparedness stages and analyse where the target audience is, as communication may need to be tweaked somewhat from one step to the next.

3. Message development
   1. Message content – “What has to be said”
      • The communicator must determine what to say to the target audience to elicit the intended response. This is a ‘theme’ or a ‘USP’ (Unique Selling Proposition).
      • The message can include three forms of appeals: rational appeals, emotional appeals, and moral appeals.
   2. Message organisation: “How to say it logically” The following are the primary concerns with message structure:
      • Drawing a conclusion
      • One-sided or two-sided arguments
      • Persuasion order (the most vital point to be told first or last depends upon audience reaction and perception).
   3. Message structure: “How to Say It Symbolically”
      • Print – Headline, Illustration, Colour, and Image
      • Voice, Music, Message, Source – Celebrities
      • Television – In addition to body language.

4. Which medium should be used? There are two alternatives:
   1. Direct communication
   2. Non-Individual Communication (Newspaper, Magazine, TV, Radio, etc.) Advocate Channel: Company sales representatives.

The Expert Channel comprises impartial experts who make statements to target purchasers.

Word of mouth or social channels—via friends and family members (the product is costly and risky, has a significant social status, etc.).

5. Which source should be used?
   1. The source is the person who initiated the communication. The communicator has direct control of the audience.
   2. Messages supplied by highly reliable sources will increase the image’s persuasiveness.

6. Gathering feedback
   1. This typically entails forming a sample of members of the target audience and asking them pertinent questions to assess the success of promotional decisions.

10.3.3 Developing Efficient Communications

Marketing communicators must

(1) identify the target audience,

(2) establish communication objectives,

(3) design the message, and

(4) manage and coordinate the entire marketing communication process.

Determine the Target Audience

A marketing communicator must begin with a specific audience in mind. The audience could include future buyers of the company’s products, present users, decision-makers, or influencers. Individuals, groups, particular publics, or the whole public may form the audience. The intended audience will heavily influence the communicator’s selection of what to say. How should it be said, when it should be spoken, where it should be said, and who should say it?

Before establishing communication objectives, communicators should research the audience’s needs, attitudes, preferences, and other characteristics. Establishing the audience’s present image of the object is one of the most crucial things to do.

Images Analysis

A significant portion of the audience is used to analyse the audience’s current perception of the company, its product, and its competitors. People’s attitudes and actions toward an object are heavily influenced by their perceptions. An image is a person’s beliefs, thoughts, and impressions about an object.

Semantic differentials are one of the most widely used methods. It consists of the following steps:

1. Creating a collection of pertinent dimensions
2. Reducing the number of relevant dimensions
3. Giving the instrument to a random sample of respondents
4. Compiling the results
5. Examining the image variance

Marketers should now create a mental image of the desired image in contrast to the present image. A company that wants to improve its image must be patient. The persistence of images can be explained by the fact that once people have a particular image of an object, they tend to be selective perceivers of subsequent evidence.

Determining the Communication Objectives

After identifying the target audience and its characteristics, the marketing communicator must define the desired response. Of course, the ultimate answer is purchase. However, consumer behaviour is the ultimate product of a lengthy process of consumer choice marking. The marketing communicator must understand how to shift the target audience from their current readiness to buy to a higher degree of readiness to buy. We will use “hierarchy-of-effects” models to characterise the six buyer–readiness states: Awareness, Knowledge, Liking, Preference, Conviction, and Possible, depending on the level of consumer involvement and the degree of brand variations.

Designing the Message

After defining the desired audience response, communicators craft a compelling message. The message should ideally attract attention, hold interest, arouse desire, and elicit action. In practice, few communications drive the buyer from awareness to purchase, but the framework suggests desired characteristics.

Management and Coordination of the Marketing Communication Process

Communication techniques and messages that are available to reach the target audience need coordination. Otherwise, the messages may be out of sync with the availability of goods, lack consistency, or be ineffective in cost. If left to their own devices, each management of a communication resource will compete for a more significant budget, regardless of the relative advantages of each instrument.

Other Necessary Modes

1. Develop trust to talk openly and freely with others.
2. Remove impediments to positive communication.
3. Communicate nonverbally as well as verbally.
4. Build stronger relationships through active listening
5. Handle workplace conflict

10.4 IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications)

Different marketing and communication tasks are typically managed as entirely different entities, and such businesses are unaware that marketing communication tools must be integrated for communication effectiveness and to project a consistent image to target markets.

Many companies recognise the need for increased strategic coordination of different promotional elements. Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) attempts to coordinate various marketing and promotional activities to make marketing communication to target customers more effective and efficient. The first definition of IMC by the American Association of Advertising Agencies says:

“… a concept of marketing communications planning that recognises the added value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communication disciplines – for example, general advertising, direct response, sales promotion, and public relations – and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communications impact.”

Don E. Schultz, “Integrated Marketing Communications: Maybe Definition Is in the Point of View,” Marketing News January 18, 1993.

However, Don E. Schultz advocates for a broader perspective that considers “all sources of brand and company contact that a customer or prospect has with a product or service. It requires firms to develop a total marketing communications strategy that recognises how a firm’s marketing activities, not just promotion, communicate with its customers.”

To fully understand IMC, one must look through the consumer’s eyes. Many customers perceive advertising to include not only television, print, and other forms of media but also door-to-door selling, shopping bags, and even community-sponsored activities. Consumer views of a company’s image, products, or services are influenced by factors other than promotion. Other elements, such as package design, product or service price, selected distribution outlets, displays, news reports, word-of-mouth, gossip, experts’ opinions, and financial reports, in addition to advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, PR/publicity, direct marketing, and messages on the Internet, etc., communicate powerfully.

Say, Do and Confirm Model

All such communications, whether sponsored or not, combine to form an integrated product in consumers’ minds. This means that customers integrate all brand-related signals from the firm or any other source, defining their opinion of the company.

Marketers must realise that everything they do or do not do conveys a message. Every company operation has a message component. According to Duncan and Moriarty, consumers and stakeholders receive four company/brand-related messages.

1. Planned messages: Planned messages represent what businesses say about themselves. These messages are standard marketing communications such as advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, direct marketing, and publicity. Because they are perceived as marketer-controlled and self-serving, such messages frequently have the most negligible impact. Messages should be planned to achieve a predetermined set of communication objectives. This is the most fundamental component of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC).
2. Product messages: Product or service messages explain what the organisation does. Product messages are communications from the product, pricing, and distribution. Customers and others receive entirely different messages from a ’75 lakh BMW and a ‘2.36 lakh Maruti 800, for example. Product messages have a high impact because when a product delivers on its promises, the consumer receives a good and reinforcing message. However, if there is a discrepancy between the product’s performance and the conveyed promises, the client is more likely to get a negative message.
3. Service messages: Employee contact with customers can also be a messaging source. In many service-providing organisations, customer service staff are often controlled by operations rather than marketing. The provided service sends messages with a higher impact than the planned messages.
4. Unplanned messages: These are confirmed because they represent what others say and confirm/deny what the company says and does. Companies have little influence over unplanned messages from staff gossip, uncontrolled news items, comments passed on by traders or competitors, word-of-mouth communications, or significant tragedies. These unplanned messages, whether positive or negative, can significantly impact consumer attitudes.

Integrated marketing communications aim to coordinate a company’s marketing and promotional efforts to project and reinforce a consistent, unified image of the company or its brands to the market. The IMC method attempts to improve the traditional method of treating promotion elements as separate activities. IMC is increasingly assisting companies in developing the most appropriate and effective strategies for contacting customers and other interested groups.

IMC is one of the “new generation” marketing methodologies being utilised by firms to better focus their marketing efforts on gaining, keeping, and growing relationships with consumers and other stakeholders, according to Thomas R. Duncan and Sandra E. Moriarty. Among other things, the value of strategically integrating diverse parts of communications operations and taking advantage of the ensuing synergy among different instruments in producing more effective and efficient marketing communication programmes is an essential and critical factor. According to experts, IMC is one of the simplest ways to maximise the return on investment in marketing and promotion. According to Tom Duncan and Steve Everett, implementing IMC in practice is difficult since it causes turf battles within departments, and organisations want to adopt it but don’t know how.

Mainstream media no longer serves the vast audiences needed by marketers. Individual audiences for each media have shrunk, highlighting the necessity of guaranteeing that the prospect receives a consistent message whenever and wherever he or she is exposed to it. Customers rarely distinguish between message sources; they only remember the message they received. Given how many messages consumers are assaulted with daily, mixed messages from the same source are bound to confuse and, worse, will be forgotten more rapidly.

Although understanding the importance of marketing communications is relatively simple, determining the best way to implement a marketing communications programme is becoming increasingly difficult. The buying public has been smothered alive in advertisements. Every day, consumers are assaulted with hundreds of ads and television commercials, not to mention thousands of billboards, packages, website pop-ups, and other logo sightings.

A longitudinal consumer purchase database is the foundation for the IMC planning process. Ideally, this database would include demographics, psychographics, purchase data, and possibly some information about how the household thinks about [or has experience with] the product category, broken down by household. In many cases, direct-marketing companies already have this type of data. An IMC programme is implemented based on the demands and lifestyles of the chosen target groups, allowing for tailored yet consistent message tactics to sell increasingly customised products.

The company carefully integrates and coordinates its communication channels through integrated marketing communications to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organisation and its products. Integrated communications result in improved communication consistency and increased sales effect. Integrated marketing communications is a technique of viewing the entire marketing process through the eyes of the customer.

Integrated Marketing Communications

1. Integrated marketing communications is a marketing communications planning concept that recognises the value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of various communications disciplines – such as general advertising, direct response, sales promotion, and public relations – and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communications impact (through the seamless integration of discrete messages).
2. IMC – combining and integrating various components of the communication mix.
3. On the other hand, the primary principle underpinning IMC is that advertising has diverse strengths and weaknesses and must thus be integrated and consistent with different aspects of the communication mix.
4. The various elements of the communication mix must be used in such a way that the strengths of one are used to compensate for the weaknesses of another. One of advertising’s flaws, for example, is its inability to elicit immediate action. Advertising can frequently raise awareness and foster favourable attitudes but cannot always provide the final “push” required to elicit an enquiry, trial, or sale. When such a situation arises, a marketer must employ direct or sales promotions to elicit the desired action, possibly after the advertising campaign.

Two fundamental forces are reshaping today’s marketing communications:

1. Because broad markets have fractured, marketers are transitioning from mass marketing to focused programmes.
2. Computer and information technology advances are hastening the transition to segmented marketing. New technologies have made it possible to target smaller groups with tailored messages.