Integrated Marketing Communications

marketing fundamentals -- part 12 -- summary

Advertising, sales promotion, and public relations

Modern marketing calls for more than just developing a good product, pricing it attractively, and making it available to target customers. Companies also must communicate with current and prospective customers to inform them about product benefits and carefully position products in the consumers mind. To do this, they must blend five communication-mix tools, guided by a well-designed and well implemented integrated marketing communications strategy.

Recent shifts toward targeted one-to-one marketing, coupled with advances in information technology, have had a dramatic impact on marketing communications. As marketing communicators adapt richer but more fragmented media and promotion mixes to reach their diverse markets, they risk creating a communications hodgepodge for consumers. To prevent this, more companies are adapting the concept of integrated marketing communications (IMC). Guided by an overall IMC strategy, the company works out the roles that the various promotional tools will play and the extent to which each will be used. It carefully coordinates the promotional activities and the timing of when major campaigns take place. Finally, to help implement its integrated marketing strategy, the company appoints a marketing communications director who has overall responsibility for the company's communications efforts.

A companies total marketing communications mix -- also called its promotion mix -- consists of the specific blend of advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing tools that the company uses to pursue its advertising and marketing objectives. Advertising includes any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor. In contrast, public relations focuses on building good relations with the company's various public's by obtaining favorable unpaid publicity. Personal selling is any form of personal presentation by the firm sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships. Firms use sales promotion to provide short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service. Finally firms seeking immediate response from targeted individual customers use nonpersonal direct marketing tools to communicate with customers.

The company wants to create an integrated promotion mix. It can pursue a push or pull promotional strategy, or combination of the two. The best specific blend of promotion tools depends on the type of product/market and the product lifecycle stage. People at all levels of the organization must be aware of the many legal and ethical issues surrounding marketing communications.

Advertising -- the use of a media by a seller to inform, persuade, and remind consumers in the about its products or organization -- is a strong promotion tool that takes many forms and has many uses. Advertising decision-making involves decisions about the objectives, the budget, the message, the media, and, finally, the evaluation of results. Advertisers should set clear objectives as to whether the advertising is supposed to inform, persuade, or remind buyers. The advertising budget can be based on what is affordable, on sales, on competitors spending, or on the objectives and tasks. The message decision calls for planning a message strategy and executing it effectively, the media decision involves defining reach, frequency, and impact goals; choosing major media types; selecting media vehicles; and deciding on media timing. Message and media decisions must be closely coordinated for maximum campaign effectiveness. Finally, evaluation calls for evaluating the communication and sales effects of advertising before, during, and after the advertising is placed.

Sales promotion campaigns

Sales promotion covers a wide variety of short-term incentive tools -- coupons, premiums, contest, buying allowances -- designed to stimulate final and business consumers, the trade, and the companies and sales force. Sales promotion spending has been growing faster than advertising spending in recent years. A sales promotion campaign first calls for setting sales promotion objectives (in general, sales promotions should be consumer relationship building). It then calls for developing and implementing the sales promotion program by using consumer promotion tools (samples, coupons, cash refunds or rebates, price packs, premiums, advertising specialties, patronage rewards, and others); trade promotion tools (discounts, allowances, free goods, push money); and business promotion tools (conventions, trade shows, sales contests). The sales promotion effort should be coordinated carefully with the firms other promotional efforts.

Public relations

Public relations involves building good relations with the company's various publics. Its functions include press agency, product publicity, public affairs, lobbying, investor relations, and development. Public relations can have a strong impact on public awareness at a much lower cost than advertising can, and public relations results can sometimes be spectacular. Despite its potential strengths, however, public relations sometimes see only limited and scattered use.

Public relations tools include news, speeches, special event, buzz marketing, written materials, audiovisual materials, corporate identity materials, and public service activities. A company's Web site can be a good public relations vehicle. In considering when and how to use product public relations, management should set PR objectives, choose the PR messages in vehicles, implement the PR plan, and evaluate the results. Public relations should be blended smoothly with other promotion activities within the company's overall integrated marketing communications effort.