Part 6: Communicating Value
Chapter 15 – Designing and Managing Integrated Marketing
Communications
I………………………………. Chapter Overview/Objectives/Outline
A. 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 non-personal, are selected. Next, the total promotion budget can be established.
Four common methods are the affordable method, the percentage-of-sales method, the
competitive-parity method, and the objective-and-task method.
its products, services, or organization—is a potent promotional tool. Advertising takes on many
forms (national, regional, local, consumer, industrial, retail, product, brand, institutional, etc.)
designed to achieve a variety of objectives (awareness, interest, preference, brand recognition,
brand insistence).
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competitors’ expenditures, or based on objectives and tasks; and based on more advanced
decision models that are available.
before, during, and after the advertising.
Sales promotion and public relations are two tools of growing importance in marketing
planning. Sales promotion covers a wide variety of short-term incentive tools designed to
stimulate consumer markets, the trade, and the organization’s own sales force. Sales promotion
expenditures now exceed advertising expenditures and are growing at a faster rate. Consumer
and implementing the sales promotion program; and evaluating the results.
Marketing public relations (MPR) is another important communication/promotion tool.
Traditionally, it has been the least utilized tool but is now recognized for its ability in building
awareness and preference in the marketplace, repositioning products, and defending them.
B. Learning Objectives
Learn the roles of Marketing Communications.
Identify the major steps of developing effective communications.
Define the communication mix.
Determine how to set the communication mix.
C. Chapter Outline
I. Introduction – This chapter describes how communications work, what marketing
communications can do for a company and how holistic marketers combine and
integrate marketing communications. An opening vignette describes how Ocean Spray
reintroduced its Ocean Spray Cranberry to the market as a “versatile fruit that supplies
modern-day benefits.
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Communications can also contribute to brand equity by establishing the brand in
memory and creating a brand image while it strengthens customer loyalty, driving sales
and affecting shareholder value.
A. The Changing Marketing Communications environment
1. Technology advances create extreme dynamics for the optimal
communication processes as envisioned by both the organization and the
customer and have eroded the effectiveness of mass media methods
communications.
3. Must be creative while avoiding the intrusion of customer’s lives.
4. Refer to “Marketing Insight: Don’t Touch That Remote” for a
description of developments in television advertising
B. Marketing Communications, Brand equity, and Sales
1. Eight major modes of communication in marketing communication mix
a) Advertising
b) Sales promotion
c) Events and experiences
d) Public relations and publicity
e) Direct Marketing
f) Interactive marketing
g) Word-of-mouth marketing
h) Personal selling
equity.
C. Communications Process Models
1. Macromodel of the communication process – nine elements (see figure
15.1)
a) Major parties in communication – sender and receiver
feedback
d) Noise (random and competing messages that may interfere with
intended communication)
summarizes four classic response hierarchy models.
a) “learn-feel-do” – appropriate when there is high consumer
involvement and perceived high product or service
differentiation
little or no differentiation
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and little or no differentiation
III. Developing Effective Communications (eight steps, first 5 steps are covered under this
section III, steps 6 and 7 fall under IV and step eight is outlined in V)
A. Identify the Target Audience
1. Image analysis is a major part of audience analysis that entails assessing
a person holds regarding an object)
a) First step is to measure target audience’s knowledge of the
subject using a familiarity scale
favorability scale
2. The specific content of a product’s image is best determined with use of
semantic differential (relevant dimensions, reducing set of relevant
checking on the image variance)
B. Determine the Communications Objectives (Rossiter and Percy’s four possible
objectives)
equity
currently relevant need
4. Brand purchase intention – self-instructions to purchase or take
purchase-related action
C. Design the Communications
1. Message strategy – develop appeals, themes, or ideas that tie into
positioning and establish points-of-difference or points-of-parity
2. Creative strategy – message translated into specific communication, two
methods of classification
a) Informational appeals – elaboration on attributes or benefits
b) Transformational appeals – elaborate on a non-product-related
benefit or image (e.g. demonstration of the type of person that
uses the brand)
3. Message source – expertise, trustworthiness, and likeability
a) Expertise – specialized knowledge the communicator possesses to
back the claim.
b) Trustworthiness – how objective and honest the source is perceived
to be.
c) Likeability – Source’s attractiveness
good
image to reduce some negative feelings toward a brand but in the
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process might lose some esteem with the audience.
buyers in the target market
b) Expert channels – consist of independent experts making
statements to target buyers
c) Social channels – consist of neighbors, friends, family members,
and associates talking to target buyers.
relations)
3. Integration of communications channels
a) Personal communication more effective than mass
communication
b) Mass communication may stimulate personal communication
(two-step flow implications)
(1) Mass media mediated by opinion leaders
acquire ideas from opinion leaders
E. Establish the total marketing communication budget
1. Affordable method – setting the communication budget at what managers
think the company can afford.
2. Percentage-of-sales method – setting the communication budget at a
communication)
1. Advertising – reach, pervasive, allows for focus on specific aspects of
brand and product
2. Sales promotion – draws attention to product, provides incentive to
communication mix. Three distinct qualities
a) High credibility
b) Ability to reach hard-to-find buyers
c) Ability to tell the brand or product story
4. Events and experiences – highly relevant actively engaging for
customers and indirect soft-sell approach
5. Direct and interactive marketing
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a) Customized for addressed individual
b) Able to prepare quickly
c) Can be changed depending on response
timely and personal
7. Personal selling – most effective in later stages in he buying process.
Three notable qualities
a) Personal interaction
b) Ability to cultivate relationships
c) Personal choices for response
B. Factors in Setting the Marketing Communications Mix
1. Define the market types, as each requires different allocations.
Addresses stages of consumer purchase readiness as promotional tools
vary in cost effectiveness at different buyer readiness stages
2. Communication tools vary in cost effectiveness at different stages of the
product life cycle. Refer to Figure 15.4 for an example of Cost
effectiveness of Three Different Communication Tools at Different
Buyer-readiness stages.
3. Communication tools vary in cost effectiveness at different product
life-cycle stages
a) Introduction stage – most cost effective are advertising, events
and experiences, and publicity followed by personal selling to
gain distribution coverage and sales promotion and direct
marketing to induce trial
b) Growth stage – demand has its own momentum through
word-of-mouth and interactive marketing. Advertising, events
and experiences and personal become more important in
maturity.
c) Decline stage – sales promotion continues strong, other
communication tools are reduced, sales reps give less attention to
product
C. Measuring Communication Results
attitudes
2. Collect behavioral measures of audience response including
transactional data and word-of-mouth
V. Managing the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Process – IMC is a
concept of marketing communications planning that recognizes the added value of a
comprehensive plan.
A. Coordinating media
1. Combine personal and non-personal communication channels for
maximum impact
2. Multiple-vehicle, multiple-stage campaign approach – achieve
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3. Coordinate online and offline communication efforts
4. Use Facebook and other web sites to drive customers into stores
B. Implementing IMC
1. Unify various brand images and messages
2. Look at whole marketing process
communications
VI. Executive Summary
“Marketing Communications as the Key Tool in an Uncontrollable
Marketing Environment”
This discussion provides focus on the increasing importance of marketing communications, as
stand-alone interactive media to this mix) successful interactive projects work the same way as
traditional vehicles: in harmony with the wider communications plan.
Teaching Objectives
To understand how today’s uncontrollable environment has led largely to the increased use of
marketing communications.
promotional strategy.
To present the advantages of a tool often used in an integrated marketing communications
program: a company newsletter.
Discussion
INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
who are not interested.
Mass media no longer serves the mass audiences sought by marketers. Individual audiences for
each media have decreased, thus indicating a need to ensure that whenever and wherever the
prospect is exposed to the message, he or she receives a consistent one. Customers typically do
not differentiate between message sources; they only remember the message they received.
forgotten.
While understanding the importance of marketing communications is somewhat simple,
finding the best means through which to implement a marketing communications program has
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other logo sightings every day.
Old advertising venues are packed to the point of impenetrability as more and more sales
messages are jammed in. Supermarkets carry 30,000 different packages (product packages),
each of which acts as a mini-billboard, up from 17,500 a decade ago.1 Networks air 6,000
commercials a week, up 50 percent since 1983.2 Prime-time TV carries up to 15 minutes of
viewers zap so many commercials.
The IMC planning process is based on a longitudinal consumer purchase database. Ideally, this
database would contain, by household, demographics, psychographics, purchase data, and
perhaps some information about how the household feels about or is involved with the product
category. In many cases, direct-marketing organizations already have this type of information
increasingly individualized products.
1Food Marketing Institute.
2Pretesting Co.
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