Modern Marketing Strategies: A Guide to Inbound, Integrated, and Transmedia Approaches
Inbound Marketing
Gone are the days of bombarding prospects with print and TV ads. Today, people don’t want to be interrupted. Instead, they’re literally turning away from brands that keep using traditional means. The good news is marketing has changed too.
Inbound marketing is about delivering the right content in the right place at the right time, thus creating marketing that people love. Instead of interrupting with cold calls and interruptive ads, it attracts people to your website when they’re interested in finding a solution (yours) to their problem.
Companies are building their brand in new, innovative, and effective ways that allow them to carry on a two-way discussion with customers and prospects. They’re finding ways to encourage customers to discover them instead of paying their way into their homes, mailboxes, and internet browsers.
Inbound marketing is an evolution of smarter, more strategic marketing that gets results. It’s a way to use modern technologies and tools like blogging, social media, email campaigns, and great, strategic content to reach people that were previously unavailable.
They even get involved in the process because you’ve helped them solve a problem instead of trying to persuade them to change their lives, buy your products, or use your services.
The idea that people would embrace marketing messages is largely foreign to most people. But the idea that they would willingly engage or even seek out a brand that not only solves their problems but also creates a narrative they want to be a part of is not just natural, it’s a part of our daily lives.
Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)
The American Marketing Association defines Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) as “a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time.” It’s a concept of marketing communications planning that recognizes the added value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic role of a variety of communications disciplines and combines them to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communications impact.
The IMC planning process has been compared to composing a musical score. In a piece of music, while every instrument has a specific task, the goal is to have them come together in a way that produces beautiful music.
Product Placement
Product placement is a paid product message aimed at influencing movie (or television) audiences via the planned and unobtrusive entry of a branded product into a movie (or television program).
It can also be considered a “hybrid message,” a combination of advertising and publicity that includes all paid attempts to influence audiences for commercial benefit using communications that project a non-commercial character. Under these circumstances, audiences are likely to be unaware of the commercial influence attempt and/or to process the content of such communications differently than they process commercial messages.”
It is this unobtrusive entry of a commercial message in a movie or television show that makes product placement different from most other forms of marketing communications. This embedding of commercial messages in another type of communication is a clear example of the blurring of the lines between commercial communications and entertainment, which has become more prevalent in recent years.
Generally, a product is placed in a movie or television show in return for payment of money or other promotional consideration by the marketer. Prices can vary for placement, depending on the nature of the placement in the movie (TV program, book, video game, comic, etc.). Product placement can be passive or active.
Product placement in movies has actually been around since the 1940s. The original motivation for product placements was on the part of the motion picture studios in their effort to add a greater level of reality to the movies by having real brands in the stories. Over time, however, motion picture producers became aware of the commercial value of these placement opportunities, and the practice has become far more prevalent.
Transmedia Storytelling
Transmedia stories “are stories told across multiple media. At the present time, the most significant stories tend to flow across multiple media platforms.”
In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa. (Jenkins, 2003)
Transmedia storytelling is a particular narrative structure that expands through both different languages (verbal, iconic, etc.) and media (cinema, comics, television, video games, etc.). It is not just an adaptation from one medium to another. The story that the comics tell is not the same as that told on television or in cinema; the different media and languages participate and contribute to the construction of the transmedia narrative world.
A traditional marketing strategy of media companies is to develop the same story in different media and languages, for example, the comic book version of the Alien Resurrection film or the film version of Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind. In transmedia storytelling, the strategy goes further and develops a multimodal narrative world expressed in different media and languages. The Matrix and Harry Potter are not just names of movies or narrative sagas for young readers; they’re heavyweight narrative brands that express themselves in different media, languages, and business areas.
Economic subjects no longer try to sell a product or service by means of persuasive advertising. Now the objectives are much more ambitious; they aim to create a symbolic universe endowed with meaning: brands (Scolari, 2008a).
From a semiotic perspective, the brand is a device that can produce a discourse, give it meaning, and communicate this to audiences. The brand expresses values and is presented as an interpretative contract between the companies and the consumers; it proposes a series of values and the consumers accept (or not) to become part of this world. Therefore, brands appear as narrative or possible worlds since they constitute complex discourse universes with a strong narrative imprint.
In transmedia storytelling, then, the brand is expressed by the characters, topics, and aesthetic style of the fictional world. This set of distinctive attributes can be translated into different languages and media: It is a “moveable” set of properties that can be applied to different forms of expression. In fan fiction, even consumers can participate in the expansion of the fictional world by applying this set of attributes to create new situations and characters.
Unique Selling Proposition
The concept of “USP” is credited to Rosser Reeves, one of the first to develop a technique for communicating in an overcrowded marketplace. All advertising must make a proposition to the customer: Buy this, and you will receive a specified benefit.
The proposition must be unique; something competitors cannot claim, or have not chosen to emphasize in their promotions.
USP is a concept similar to positioning and is integrally related to copy strategy. These concepts share a common focus —making a specific offering unique and desirable to a specific audience.