Marketing Knowledge Section
Marketing Knowledge
Golden Rules
Despite the many benefits of Integrated Marketing Communications (or IMC); there are also many barriers. Here’s how you can ensure you become integrated and stay integrated – 10 Golden Rules of Integration.
(1) Get Senior Management Support for the initiative by ensuring they understand the benefitsof IMC.
(2) Integrate At Different Levels of management. Put ‘integration’ on the agenda for various types of management meetings – whether annual reviews or creative sessions. Horizontally – ensure that all managers, not just marketing managers understand the importance of a consistent message – whether on delivery trucks or product quality. Also ensure that Advertising, PR, Sales Promotions staff are integrating their messages. To do this you must have carefully planned internal communications, that is, good internal marketing.
(3) Ensure the Design Manual or even a Brand Book is used to maintain common visual standards for the use of logos, type faces, colours and so on.
(4) Focus on a clear marketing communications strategy. Have crystal clear communications objectives; clear positioning statements. Link core values into every communication. Ensure all communications add value to (instead of dilute) the brand or organisation. Exploit areas of sustainable competitive advantage.
(5) Start with a Zero Budget. Start from scratch. Build a new communications plan. Specify what you need to do in order to achieve your objectives. In reality, the budget you get is often less than you ideally need, so you may have to prioritise communications activities accordingly.
(6) Think Customers First. Wrap communications around the customer’s buying process. Identify the stages they go through before, during and after a purchase. Select communication tools which are right for each stage. Develop a sequence of communications activities which help the customer to move easily through each stage.
(7) Build Relationships and Brand Values. All communications should help to develop stronger and stronger relationships with customers. Ask how each communication tool helps to do this. Remember: customer retention is as important as customer acquisition.
(8) Develop a Good Marketing Information System which defines who needs what information when. A customer database for example, can help the telesales, direct marketing and sales force. IMC can help to define, collect and share vital information.
(9) Share Artwork and Other Media. Consider how, say, advertising imagery can be used in mail shots, exhibition stands, Christmas cards, news releases and web sites.
(10) Be prepared to change it all. Learn from experience. Constantly search for the optimum communications mix. Test. Test. Test. Improve each year. ‘Kaizen’.
Just a few ways to beat the barriers and enjoy the benefits of integrated marketing communications.
Communications Theory
How do we communicate? How do customers process information? There are many models and theories. Let’s take a brief look at some of them.
Simple communications models show a sender sending a message to a receiver who receives and understands it. Real life is less simple – many messages are misunderstood, fail to arrive or, are simply ignored.
Thorough understanding of the audience’s needs, emotions, interests and activities is essential to ensure the accuracy and relevance of any message.
Instead of loud ‘buy now’ advertisements, many messages are often designed or ‘encoded’ so that the hard sell becomes a more subtle soft sell. The sender creates or encodes the message in a form that can be easily understood or decoded by the receiver.
Clever encoding also helps a message to cut through the clutter of other advertisements and distractions, what is called ‘noise’. If successful, the audience will spot the message and then decode or interpret it correctly. The marketer then looks for ‘feedback’ such as coupons returned from mailshots, to see if the audience has decoded the message correctly.
The single step model – with a receiver getting a message directly from a sender – is not a complete explanation.
Many messages are received indirectly through a friend or through an opinion leader.
Communications are in fact multifaceted, multi-step and multi-directional. Opinion leaders talk to each other. Customers talk to opinion leaders and they talk to each other.
Add in ‘encode, decode, noise and feedback’ and the process appears more complex still.
Understanding multiphase communications helps marketers communicate directly through mass media and indirectly through targeting opinion leaders, opinion formers, style leaders, innovators, and other influential people.
How messages are selected and processed within the minds of the target market is a vast and complex question. Although it is over seventy years old, rather simplistic and too hierarchical, a message model, like AIDA, attempts to map the mental processes through which a buyer passes en route to making a purchase.
There are many other models that attempt to identify each stage. In reality the process is not always a linear sequence. Buyers often loop backwards at various stages perhaps for more information. There are other much more complex models that attempt to map the inner workings of the mind.
In reality, marketers have to select communications tools that are most suitable for the stage which the target audience has reached. For example, advertising may be very good at raising awareness or developing interest, while free samples and sales promotions may be the way to generate trial. This is just a glimpse into some of the theory. Serious marketers read a lot more.
Barriers to IMC
Despite its many benefits, Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC, has many barriers.
In addition to the usual resistance to change and the special problems of communicating with a wide variety of target audiences, there are many other obstacles which restrict IMC. These include: Functional Silos; Stifled Creativity; Time Scale Conflicts and a lack of Management know-how.
Take functional silos. Rigid organisational structures are infested with managers who protect both their budgets and their power base.
Sadly, some organisational structures isolate communications, data, and even managers from each other. For example the PR department often doesn’t report to marketing. The sales force rarely meet the advertising or sales promotion people and so on. Imagine what can happen when sales reps are not told about a new promotional offer!
And all of this can be aggravated by turf wars or internal power battles where specific managers resist having some of their decisions (and budgets) determined or even influenced by someone from another department.
Here are two difficult questions – What should a truly integrated marketing department look like? And how will it affect creativity?
It shouldn’t matter whose creative idea it is, but often, it does. An advertising agency may not be so enthusiastic about developing a creative idea generated by, say, a PR or a direct marketing consultant.
IMC can restrict creativity. No more wild and wacky sales promotions unless they fit into the overall marketing communications strategy. The joy of rampant creativity may be stifled, but the creative challenge may be greater and ultimately more satisfying when operating within a tighter, integrated, creative brief.
Add different time scales into a creative brief and you’ll see Time Horizons provide one more barrier to IMC. For example, image advertising, designed to nurture the brand over the longer term, may conflict with shorter term advertising or sales promotions designed to boost quarterly sales. However the two objectives can be accommodated within an overall IMC if carefully planned.
But this kind of planning is not common. A survey in 1995, revealed that most managers lack expertise in IMC. But its not just managers, but also agencies. There is a proliferation of single discipline agencies. There appear to be very few people who have real experience of all the marketing communications disciplines. This lack of know how is then compounded by a lack of commitment.
For now, understanding the barriers is the first step in successfully implementing IMC.
Marketing Information Systems
A Marketing Information System is basically a way of regularly gathering and giving helpful marketing information to the right people at the right time.
The key element is knowing what kind of information is needed by whom and when.
Information needs, information sources and information costs change over time and so a review, or information audit, is worth doing every few years.
An information audit specifies who needs what and when. The audit can also list where the information can be found – the gold mine of information sources.
There are many different types of information which a marketing manager uses, and many ways of building a marketing information system. Here is one way of thinking about it.
Consider these components: Internal Information; External Information; Position Information; Decision Information and Forecast Information.
Examples of internal information are sales reports, sales analyses, cost per sale and cost per enquiry. Most of the raw data is already available within the organisation. It just needs to be processed or analysed so that it becomes helpful information. This is relatively easy to do if there is an information system. Customer database systems for example, automatically convert customer data into marketing opportunities like identifying which customers are ready to buy this month, next month or next year.
External information covers the market out there – its size, structure, trends, opportunities, threats, competitors and customers both new and old – the constantly changing market place. All kinds of employees, customers and distributors can contribute to this pool of marketing intelligence.
Position information puts internal and external information together, like the organisation’s sales and the overall sales in the market to calculate market share.
Similarly, internal strengths & weaknesses can be compared to competitors to find competitive advantage, USP’s (Unique Selling Points), and most importantly whether any competitive advantage is sustainable.
Decision Information comes from mathematical models which carry out various analyses such as regression, correlation, factor, and cluster analyses.
Forecast information obviously looks into the future and includes sales forecasts – the backbone of the marketing plan.
Some of this information is free, some is expensive, some takes time to gather and analyse, some is just not worth the effort in the first place.
There is, therefore, a trade-off between the importance, or value, of information and its cost in terms of time and money. Experienced managers know which information affects which decisions. They know which information is vital.