Free Discipline: Marketing Essay Example

The chapter marketing communications deals with the promotion in relation to the marketing mix, task and purposes of promotion, element of promotion mix, the communication process, and factors that influence promotional mix.
Promotional strategies are advertising, personal selling, public relations and sales promotion. These are also called a promotional mix and entail the promotional plans. The marketing mix has elements such as promotion, product, price, and distribution. The elements target the market.
Communication is the exchange of meanings by use of common symbols. Marketing communication includes mass communication and interpersonal communication. The process of communication must involve the sender who encodes the message, message channel and the receiver who decodes the message. The sender’s role includes reminding, persuading and informing while the receiver adapts the messages, developing information and starting a new communication.
The goals of promotion include reminding, persuading, connecting and informing the public about a product. Advertising media include television, books, radio, billboards, newspapers, transit cards e-mail, websites, banner ads and interactive video kiosk. Advertising has advantages such as reaching large number of public, low cost in each contact. The disadvantages include high total cost and expensive for small companies.
The purpose of public relations includes identifying public attitudes, interests and executes processes to that earn public understanding. Sales promotion stimulates customers buying and effectiveness of the dealers. Personal selling entails presentation of a product with the main purpose of selling it. The online promotional tools include blogs, social networks, and podcasts.
The process of communication and the promotional mix have different communication media as paid media, owned media, and earned media. The AIDA concept entails Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. The integrated marketing communications aim to coordinate information to assure consistency contact of message between the consumers and the business.
The choice of the promotional mix is determined by market characteristics, product, and promotional fund and buying decision. Advertising has several effects on consumer as changing the negative attitude of consumers and reinforce the positive ones, and increasing the demand of the product among consumers. The main types of advertising include institutional and product advertising. The most important advertising appeals include profit, administration, environmental consciousness, health, fun and pleasure. The major advertising media include television, internet, magazines, radio and newspaper. These media have different advantages and disadvantages. The media selection depends on some quality factors such as attention to the program, the program liking, and involvement.
Public relations enhance public affairs, corporate communication, product publicity crisis management and press relations. The public relations tools include product placement, product publicity and consumer education. The main promotion includes trade sales and consumer sales promotion.
Social media refers to services and tools that employ internet to enhance conversation. The platforms and tools for social media include blogs, social networks, micro blogs and media sharing sites. Consumers in social media want to collaborate, exchange ideas and have conversations with others. The marketer engages in such conversations as long as they increase profit to the business. The consumers use social media in different ways like Facebook, twitter, you tube, blog tracking, and video sharing.
Social commerce entails interaction of users through social online networks to improve selling and buying of products. The social media for integrated marketing are evaluated according to their participation, influence, sentiment analysis, interest and search engine ranks. Classification of social media users includes collectors, critics, spectators, creators, joiners, inactive and collectors. In social networks, the goals of marketing include promoting products, increasing awareness, and highlighting expertise, performing research and developing new business. The social news site enables the user to select which content promoted on a particular Web site. The review sites allow users to rate, post, comment and read about an opinion concerning the product. Mobile technologies have become marketing popularity because of no barrier to entry. It uses tools like MMS, Mobile ads and smart phone apps.