Effective Marketing Communications and Integrated Campaigns
Chapter 12: Managing Marketing Communications
Strengthening customer loyalty and marketing communications contributes to customer equity.
- Macro View: Key aspects of communication as interactive.
- Micro View: Focuses on how message recipients respond to communication.
Buyers pass through cognitive, affective, and behavioral stages.
- ‘Learn-feel-do’ is effective when the audience has high involvement with a product category perceived to have meaningful differentiation, such as an automobile or a house.
- ‘Do-feel-learn’ is effective when the audience has high involvement but perceives little or no differentiation within the product, e.g., airline tickets or personal computers.
- ‘Learn-do-feel’ is relevant when the audience has low involvement and perceives little differentiation, such as with salt or batteries.
6 Steps in Generating a Consumer Response
- Awareness: Customers must be aware of the company’s offering.
- Knowledge: They need to know more about the offering.
- Liking: How do they feel about it?
- Preference: Compare to other competitors.
- Conviction: Need to develop the conviction to buy.
- Purchase: Make the purchase.
To increase the odds of success, make sure each step occurs:
- The right consumer is exposed to the right message at the right place and the right time.
- The offering is correctly positioned in terms of desirable and deliverable points of difference and points of parity.
- The consumer pays attention to the campaign and comprehends the intended message.
- Consumers are motivated to consider purchasing/using the offering.
The ultimate success of a company’s campaign depends on the viability of the overall strategy and tactics for managing the company’s offering.
3 Key Decisions for Objectives of a Communication Campaign
- Define the focus of company communications.
- Setting communication benchmarks.
- Determining the communication budget.
3 Communication Objectives
- Creating Awareness: Consumer’s ability to recognize/recall the brand.
- Building Preferences: The offer’s ability to meet a currently relevant consumer need.
- Inciting Action: Motivate the consumer to decide to purchase the brand or take purchase-related action.
Communication Benchmarks: Quantitative and Temporal
- Quantitative: Determine the level of awareness that the communication campaign must achieve, the desired strength of preferences among the audience, and the specific actions the campaign must create.
- Temporal: Define the timeframe within which a particular outcome has to be achieved.
7 Factors to Consider when Setting a Budget
- Stage in the Product Life Cycle
- Product Differentiation
- Market Share
- Message Complexity
- Reach
- Competitive Communication
- Available Resources
Identifying the target audience and developing communication messages are two key components.
Possible Target Audiences: Potential buyers of the company’s products, current users, deciders, influencers, individuals, groups, particular sectors, the general public.
Chapter 12: Continued
This elaboration of the positioning strategy includes considerations such as the key message, target audience, communication objectives (to do, to know, to believe), key brand benefits, support for the brand promise, and media.
In choosing a message strategy, management seeks themes that align with brand positioning, focusing on product performance (quality, value) or extrinsic qualities (contemporary, popular).
Most Common Media Formats
- Advertising
- Social Media Communication
- Mobile Communications
- Direct Marketing
- Events and Experiences
- Word of Mouth
- Publicity and Public Relations
- Personal Selling
- Packaging
Advertising: Paid form of non-personal promotion of goods.
Online: Emails, websites, search ads.
Mobile: Text messages.
Direct: Advertising to a particular person.
Events: Sports, art, entertainment.
Word of Mouth: Person to person.
Publicity: Employees to consumers.
Personal: Seller convinces the buyer.
Packaging: Effective form of communication.
3 Communication Options
- Paid Media: TV, magazine, display ads for a fee.
- Owned Media: Communication channels marketers actually own; Twitter, Facebook accounts.
- Earned Media: Consumers, the press, or outsiders spread it.
Social media plays a key role in earned media.
Media planners must consider audience size, composition, media cost, and calculate the cost per thousand persons reached.
- Audience Quality: The difference between 1 million parents and 1 million teens for baby lotion.
- Audience-Attention Probability: Readers of magazines, some pay more attention than others.
- Editorial Quality: Prestige and believability.
- Ad Placement Policies and Extra Services: Occupational editions, lead time required for magazines.
The number of exposures needed for audience awareness is contingent on the reach, frequency, and impact of the media chosen.
- Reach (R): The number of different persons or households exposed to a particular media schedule at least once during a specified time period.
- Frequency (F): The number of times within the specified time period that an average person or household is exposed to the message.
- Impact (I): The qualitative value of an exposure through a given medium (for example, a food ad should have a higher impact in Bon Appétit than in Fortune magazine).
3 Factors: Buyer Turnover, Purchase Frequency, Forgetting Rate
4 Strategies for Product Launch
- Continuity: Steady exposure, ideal for frequent purchases.
- Concentration: One-time spending, suited for seasonal items.
- Flighting: Alternates on/off periods, good for limited budgets.
- Pulsing: Low-level continuity with periodic boosts, combining steady exposure with cost efficiency.
3 Characteristics of Credibility: Expertise, Trustworthiness, Likability
ADPLAN: Attention, Distinction, Positioning, Linkage, Amplification, Net Equity
Seniors want outcome and revenues.
- Supply measures communication effectiveness for media coverage.
- Demand measures the company’s effect on the consumer.
Chapter 12: Continued (Still)
Marketing Communication: Firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers, directly or indirectly, about the products and brands they sell.
Brand vs. Performance Marketing
- Brand Goals: Feel, Learn
- Performance Goals: Act (transact)
Communication Objectives: Create Awareness, Build Preferences, Inciting Action
Budgeting: Stage in the product lifecycle, Product differentiation, Market share, Message complexity, Reach, Competitive communication, Available resources
Role in the buying process: For joint family decisions, what messages target which roles through which channels?
Crafting the Message: Creative Brief
- Set communication objectives (do, know, believe).
- Identify key brand benefits.
- Identify support for the brand.
- Identify preferred media channels.
- Creative testing (pre-launch).
Media Schedule
- Macroscheduling (seasonality, business cycle)
- Microscheduling (concentrated, action-based)
Product Launch Considerations
- Continuity (uniform)
- Concentration (large push)
- Flighting (on, off, on)
- Pulsing (low level initially, waves of heavier activity)
- Supply = How many Impressions
- Demand = How much the needle moved
Chapter 13: Designing Integrated Marketing Campaigns
IMC can occur on four distinct levels: Horizontal Integration, Vertical Integration, Internal Integration, External Integration
- Horizontal: Coordinating all relevant marketing actions to achieve maximum customer impact (Packaging, Pricing, Sales Promotion, Distribution).
- Vertical: Aligning communication objectives with higher-level goals that guide the overall marketing strategy (e.g., brand mantra, brand positioning).
- Internal: In-house. The marketing and communications team integrates relevant information from different departments, including product development, market research, sales, and customer service, to create an effective and cost-efficient campaign.
- External: Agency/Vendor approach. Marketing and communication activities are coordinated across external collaborators, including advertising, social media, public relations agencies, event organizers, and campaign co-sponsors.
6 Steps for Truly Integrated Communications
- Coverage: The proportion of the audience reached.
- Contribution: The ability to elicit the desired response from consumers.
- Commonality: The extent to which common associations are reinforced.
- Complementary: Emphasizing different associations and linkages.
- Conformability: The extent to which it works for both groups of consumers.
- Cost: Arrive at the most effective and efficient times.
Advertising is great; television is regarded as the most powerful advertising medium.
TV has three distinct strengths:
- Demonstrate product attributes and benefits.
- User usage imagery, brand personality.
- Tap into captive audiences.
Print advertising is a stark contrast to broadcast media. Readers consume at their own pace.
Magazine/Newspaper Pros: Newspapers are timely and widely read, ideal for local ads, while magazines better build brand imagery.
Cons: Print ads are declining, and newspaper ads need quality and have a short shelf life.
Chapter 13: Continued
Researchers report that the picture, headline, and copy in print ads matter, in that order of importance.
Radio is a pervasive medium, reaching 93% of U.S. citizens daily. It offers flexible, low-cost, targeted advertising, especially effective in the morning, with podcasts expanding its reach. Creative use of sound engages listeners despite the lack of visuals.
Online ads offer several advantages, with the ability to check things like unique visitors, how long they spend, what they do, and where they go after.
It also has cons: consumers can block them, and they could be hacked or lose control.
Native Ads 3 Formats
- Content Recommendations: Suggestions
- ‘In-Feed’ Advertisements: Appear in the news feed of social networks
- Search/Promoted Listings: Appear above results in Google Search (sponsored)
Place Advertising: Creative and unexpected forms to grab attention (billboards, public spaces, product placement).
Point of Purchase: Examples include ads on shopping carts, cart straps, aisles, and shelves and with in-store demonstrations, live sampling, and instant coupon machines.
Companies must design websites that reflect their purpose, history, products, and vision, ensuring they are visually appealing and engaging to encourage repeat visits.
Sites are judged on:
- Ease of Use: Content is easy to navigate and understand.
- Physical Attractiveness: Reflects the aesthetic of the website.
Two Approaches to Drive Site Traffic: Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
Social media is key in digital marketing, allowing brands to connect with consumers, reinforce communications, stay innovative, and build lasting online communities.
Social media allows for companies to have ‘two-way’ conversations.
Four Main Platforms for Social Media
- Online Communities and Forums
- Blogs
- Social Networks
- Customer Reviews
Online Communities: Online communities, whether consumer-led or company-sponsored, allow for valuable two-way communication and insights. Success relies on fostering member engagement, as seen with Apple’s product-specific discussion groups.
Blogs: A key outlet for word of mouth, ranging from personal to influential. Companies create and monitor blogs, while some consumers use them to express dissatisfaction with bad service or products.
Social Networks: Social networks are vital for marketing, but attracting attention is challenging. Influencer marketing is growing, but fraud and inflated follower counts require companies to verify influencers’ authenticity.
Customer Reviews: Reviews, especially positive ones, influence buying decisions. Online reviews are trusted after personal recommendations, but negative reviews are often valued more.
Consumers spend a lot of time on mobile – more than radio, magazines, and newspapers combined, which means it has a high appeal to marketers.
4 Characteristics of Mobile Devices
- Uniquely tied to one user.
- Is virtually always ‘on’.
- Allows for immediate consumption because it is, in effect, a channel of distribution with payment.
- Highly interactive with geotagging, pictures, video.
Chapter 13: Continued
Smart mobile devices enhance loyalty programs by allowing customers to track visits and purchases, earning rewards. Retailers can also send location-specific promotions to receptive customers near stores.
Consumers are more engaged and attentive when using their smartphones than when they are online.
Vocabulary – Chapter 12 Start
- Marketing Communication: The means by which firms inform, persuade, and remind consumers about the products and brands they sell.
- Macro Model of Marketing Communication: Description of the interaction between the sender (company) and the recipient (consumer) of the communication message.
- Micro Model of Marketing Communication: Description of consumers’ specific responses to communications.
- Communication Objective: The specific task to be accomplished with a specific audience within a specific period of time.
- Objective-and-Task Budgeting: An approach for determining the communication budget based on the specific task to be achieved.
- Competitive-Parity Budgeting: An approach to communication budgeting based on what the competition is spending.
- Creative Brief: A succinct document that outlines the specific communication approach to be used in a creative assignment.
- Macro-Scheduling Decision: The allocation of communication expenditures related to seasons and the business cycle.
- Micro-Scheduling Decision: The allocation of communication expenditures within a short time period to obtain maximum impact.
- Areas of Dominant Influence: The geographic or market areas on which the communication budget is focused.
- Informational Appeal: An elaboration of product or service attributes or benefits to influence the consumer purchasing decision.
- Principle of Congruity: Psychological mechanism by which consumers like to view seemingly related objects as being as similar as possible in favorability.
- Integrated Marketing Communications: An approach to managing a communication campaign through the coordinated use of different communication tools.
- Advertising: The presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, services, and brands using paid media.
- Contextual Placement: The purchase of ads on sites related to the product being advertised.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The activities designed to increase the likelihood that a link for a company or brand ranks as high as possible in the order of all nonpaid links that appear during online searches.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): The practice of paying search engine companies for one’s product, service, brand, or organization to be featured in the results of particular keyword searches.
- Influencer Marketing: The use of a popular figure to promote a product, service, or brand within his or her social media sphere.
- Publicity: The securing of editorial content to promote an offering, idea, organization, or image.
Vocabulary Continued – Chapter 14 Start
- Public Relations: A variety of programs designed to promote a company’s image among the relevant stakeholders.