Integrated Marketing Communications
A business organization develops different elements of promotional mix to accomplish a unified purpose of creating awareness and generating sales lead of a product or service. Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) refer to a mix and coordination of promotional strategies such as mass media and pull advertising, push advertising, sales promotions and management, personal selling, direct marketing, trade shows, exhibitions, road publicity, new digital media and public relationships. Indeed, IMC is an approach to integrate aforementioned promotional methods in an extensive marketing campaign with broader scope and greater probability of creating positive product response and positioning among consumers. The need for IMC becomes increasingly significant in contemporary international marketing environment because global marketers are required to consider cultural, language, religious, ethnic, media, legal and production constrictions and barriers in different markets other than home country. For instance, the firms now disregard the idea of standardized advertising and promotional campaigns instead prefer localized campaign taking into account socio-cultural, demographic, behavioral and psychographic differences.
A recent example of IMC is Samsung S5 campaign, which effectively integrated the use of mass media, sales promotions, social media, direct marketing and public relations to target young adults and middle-aged customers (between 16 – 50 years) who need smart phones for personal and professional use. Samsung heavily advertised S5 launch not only through television ads but also used social media such as Face Book, Twitter and You Tube for creating product awareness about core features and prices. Web banner advertising and products links were utilized to attract online users to review S5 product details. Also, the company publicized S5 at Oscar and attracted celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres to create positive word-of-mouth and opinions. Finally, Samsung offered substantial trade discounts and price reductions for early adopters to escalate switch rate from other smart phones to S5. The company sold more than 12 million units of S5 after its launch, which reflects that the phone was well received in global markets such as USA and Europe other than China, which attracts more low-end and mid-range phones from local companies such as Xiomi and others.
