Promotional Strategies & Integrated Marketing Communication

1Before promoting

1. Identify your unique features and competitive edge: your unique value proposition.
2. Find the best ways to reach the target market: their internet literacy, time online, preference for print, phone and so on.
3. Design a multi-stage promotional strategy. Each tool serves a different goal: personal selling builds close relationships, advertising reaches large audiences.

2Integrated marketing communication (IMC)

The new marketing communications

Three changes drove the new (integrated) model:

3Promotion objectives

4The promotion mix

The balance of promotional tools used to create, maintain and grow demand. To balance them, ask: what's the most effective way to inform customers? Which methods? Aimed at whom? What's the budget and how is it allocated?

5Advertising

Advertising is drawing public attention to a product through paid announcements by an identified sponsor.

Benefits:

• very cost-efficient per person for large audiences
• repeatable across media
• adds value and enhances the firm's image

Four types of advertising

Advertising strategy: four principles

1. Qualities of the product: purpose, features, advantages over alternatives. These define the message.
2. State of the market: openness to purchase, competitors' share, the economy (luxury is hard to sell in a recession).
3. Advertising goals: specific goals that give a roadmap and a way to measure effectiveness.
4. Methodology: tone, qualities emphasised, medium (TV, magazines), ad location, and budget.

The plan's elements are the product and its advantages, the customer and their characteristics, alternative ways to inform buyers, and optimising choices within the budget. No plan is perfect: resources are always limited.

Two major elements:

1. Creating the advertising message: something special and unique about the product.
2. Selecting the media: cost-effectiveness. Many ad failures come from choosing the wrong media.

6Message strategy

Factors to consider:

• target audience characteristics (age, location, attitudes)
• media type
• product factors (new vs established)
• overall advertising objective (immediate sales vs initial awareness)

Steps: identify consumer benefits → develop meaningful, believable, distinctive appeals → create a creative concept.

1. Design the message

Decide what to say (content) and how to say it (structure and format).

2. The appeal

3. Message structure: three issues

1. Draw a conclusion for the audience, or leave it to them?
2. Put the strongest arguments first or last?
3. One-sided (strengths only) or two-sided (strengths and admitted shortcomings)?

4. Message format

Use novelty and contrast (eye-catching pictures and headlines), distinctive formats (size, position), colour, shape, movement.

Clear marketing messages:

7Public relations

• PR manages perceptions of the business to attract new customers and strengthen existing loyalty.
• It uses unpaid channels (media, internet, networks, community).
• PR is more credible than paid advertising, because the result is shaped by a third party.
• Marketing promotes products; PR promotes awareness and behaviour change.

8Sales promotion

Used to launch new products, sell out inventory, attract customers and lift sales temporarily.

Objectives:

• create a market for new products (penetration pricing, offers, discounts, scarcity)
• remain competitive against rivals' short-term tactics
• gain dealers' trust (more sales means more dealer income)
• enter new markets
• increase brand awareness
• woo existing customers against competitors' poaching

Three sales-promotion strategies

• Pull: customers "pull" the product from the company through communication, seasonal discounts and finance schemes.
• Push: convince intermediaries to push the product through the channel to consumers, with trade promotions and personal selling aimed at resellers, dealers, distributors and agents.
• Hybrid: both, e.g. coupons for consumers plus incentives for merchants.

Consumer vs trade promotions

9Push vs pull channel policies

10Socially responsible marketing communication

• Social responsibility: businesses should be good citizens, combining profit-making with actions that support society (local, national, global). It attracts customers who want their purchases to make a meaningful impact.
• Examples: recyclable packaging, ads raising awareness of community problems, giving part of the proceeds to charity.

11Quiz 12: model answer

From Week 12/Quiz 12.docx in the Marketing folder.

12Quick revision sheet