Marketing communications is concerned with the creation and delivery of messages via selected media in order to communicate with the markets. It includes the processes, methods, perceptions, meanings, and actions through which organizations engage with their target audiences. It integrates all the approaches, resources, and marketing tools within an organization which are aimed at maximizing the impact on consumer mind resulting into maximization of profit at minimum costs.
According to Fill (2006), marketing communications is defined as a management process through which organizations engage with their various audiences. In order to accomplish this, the organizations develop, present, and evaluate series of messages, which they send to and receive from their different audiences. Through the understanding of the preferred communication environments of an audience, an organization seeks to create and present messages to its identified shareholder groups or audiences, and then evaluates and acts upon the responses. Through conveying the messages that are of great significance, the audience is encouraged to offer emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral responses.
This definition looks at three main aspects or themes: the engagement, the audience, and the response. Organizations use marketing communications to engage with audiences in a variety of ways, through dialogic and interactive communications that meet the audiences’ needs. The messages should encourage the target audiences to respond to the organization’s focus or the brand/product. The response can be immediate (through the use of customer care or through purchase behavior), or deferred.
Marketing communications convey the product-related information to a range of stakeholders, and incorporate the breadth and variety of connections and relationships of the stakeholders. Audiences, or stakeholders such as customers, are interested in a variety of corporate issues, some of which are related to the procedures, policies and values of the organization and some are product related. Marketing communications focuses on the audience (audience-centered), based on the understanding of the environment and the needs of the audience.
Response refers to the outcomes of a given communication process. It is used to measure the success of a given communication process. Response can either be cognitive or emotional. For a cognitive response, marketing communications help the organization in managing organization-related activities, and the audience in purchasing products and services. It assumes an audience undertakes rational information processing and is an active problem-solver. Emotional responses assume decision-making results from emotional reaction to a given communication stimulus. Marketing communications should therefore be developed in anticipation of the cognitive or emotional response of the audience.
The definitions herein consider marketing communications as a complex activity with varying degrees of complexity and success. It is used by organizations to engage the audiences and differentiate, reinforce, inform, and or persuade the audiences to feel, think, or behave in a particular manner.
Roles of marketing communications
Educating/Informing - Marketing communications is used to inform the audience and create awareness among the potential customers on an organization’s products and services or offerings. It educates the market on the products and services of a given organization.
Persuading – It persuades the current and potential customers to enter an exchange relationship. This is the primary role of marketing communications.
Reinforcing - Marketing communications is used to reinforce experiences. It can be used to remind people of their needs and the benefits of their previous transactions with an aim of convincing them to enter into a similar transaction or exchange. Besides, it provides comfort or reassurance immediately prior to the exchange or after the purchase. This helps in retaining the current customers and improving an organization’s profitability.
Differentiating - Marketing communications can be used as a differentiator, especially in a market where there is a difficulty in separating the competing brands and products. For similar products, marketing communications create brand images, which dissociates one brand from the other and enable the consumers to make appropriate purchasing decisions. This helps the consumers in developing positive attitudes and purchasing confidence.
The Marketing Communications Mix
Marketing communications mix involves tools, media, and messages. The principle marketing communications tools (methods of communication) are sales promotion, advertising, direct marketing, public relations and personal selling. The media is the means through which the communications messages are conveyed. Tools and media have different characteristics and goals.
Every tool performs a different role and accomplishes a different task, reflecting the difference in capabilities of the tools. The 4Cs framework depicts the effectiveness and key characteristics of the communication tools. They include the ability of each tool to communicate, the credibility the tool bestows on messages, the costs involved, and the control maintained by each tool.
Control – It is necessary to have control over the message to ensure that the intended message is transmitted to the target audience and received by the target audience. Sales promotion and advertising have high degree of control over the message. They permit only partial influence over the feedback.
Credibility – Public relations is the most credible. Third parties are perceived to be unbiased and their comments are seen as trustworthy and objective. Broadly; advertising, sales promotion and personal selling can lack credibility.
Communication – This includes the ability to deliver the message, the ability to reach large audience, and the level of interaction. Personal selling and direct marketing have higher degrees of delivering the message. The level of interaction is also high. However, their ability to reach large audience is low. Advertising has the highest ability to reach large audience.
Cost – These includes the costs incurred such as the absolute costs, the wastages, size of the investment, and the costs per contract. Generally, the cost of advertising and personal selling is high. Sales promotion and direct selling have medium costs while public relation has the lowest cost.
Roles of marketing
The role of offline marketing is in particular that of a push element. It is used to encourage the customers on the potential benefits of the product marketed through a wider range of marketing channels. Holistically, offline marketing is meant to encourage or arouse potential consumer’s demand.
Holistically, online marketing on the other hand serves the pull element. In particular, it is aimed at influencing the behavior and attitude of the consumers towards the product. This is achieved as a result of the product’s position in the market. The use of sales promotions and internet based techniques generally influence customers’ perception and attitude.
Integrating Marketing Communication
At a higher level, the marketing communication process not only supports the transaction, by informing, persuading, reinforcing or differentiating, but also offers a means of exchange itself. At a lower level, marketing communication is interpreted in two different ways. One of these ways is concerned with an attempt to develop brand values. Advertising for instance is mainly used to focus on establishing a set of feelings, emotions and beliefs about a brand or organization. This way, brand communication basically helps consumers think positively about a brand. This helps them remember the product and thus develop positive brand attitudes. The other concern is that marketing communication shapes behaviour as opposed to feelings. Therefore, integrated marketing communications are effective in developing brand feelings and in shaping the behavior of the company’s target consumers (Clow, & Donald, 2007).
Effective marketing communication entails effective communications, higher creditability, cost effective and maximum control. Integrated marketing communications are the media that are used to communicate with to the market. They include messages and any media of that nature. Basically, it is the promotion, which is forms part of the marketing mix. The integration of marketing communication plays a significant role. The significance can be explained using the DRIP and AIDA model.
While communicating the message to the market, marketing communicator need to develop an effective message in order to obtain the response of the desired audience. In particular, the message should be able to get the attention, hold interest, arouse desire and thus obtain action. Marketing communicators need to effectively decide on what to say (the message content) and how it should be said (the message format and structure).
Linear model of advertising suggests that communication can be modeled as a linear sequence of events. A message is communicated to the receivers by the source, who is the sender. The sender encodes into a form that carries the desired meaning. Basically, the message is encoded by a sender in a manner that that it can easily be decoded by the receiver to obtain meaning. The environment may have noise of different forms.
Sequential model follows the AIDA model where the consumers are moved along continuum of internal states from state of unawareness to awareness, then interest for the product is aroused and desire created. The consumer is finally stimulated into action by purchasing the product. Each step is a necessity for the accomplishment of the subsequent steps. Basically, the linear model represents the high-involvement purchase.
Differentiate
Differences created in product brand or product ranges enhance communication. Products differentiated from that of the competitors simply arouse market demand. Also, providing up-to-date products, which is part of differentiation enhances market positioning. In effect, customers are able to identify the company products.
Remind
The customers are reassured or reminded of the taste and experience of the brand. Basically, this helps potential customers keep remembering the product as well as their preferred company. It reminds the customers of a need they might have or reminding them of the benefits of past transactions with a view to convincing them that they should enter into a similar transaction again (Fill, 2009).
Inform
Customers are informed and educated on the ethics and economics of fair trade and the benefits of using the product. Accordingly, the information regarding the new products, products and any developments new in the product or the company is made availed to customers. In effect, behaviour and attitude towards the product is influenced with time.
Persuade
Persuading potential consumers and retailers to purchase and distribute the product. Persuading generally encourages the buying of the product. The choices of customers are tackled and thus the company is able to present accurate products that relate to the choices. In effect, it facilitates product purchase.
Works Cited
Clow, K.E., and Donald B., 2007. Integrated Advertising Promotion and Marketing Communications, 3rd Edition, Upper Saddle River.
Fill, C., 2006. Simply Marketing Communications. 1st Edition, Prentice Hall.
Fill, C., 2009. Introduction to Marketing Communications. Retrieved 7 May 2012, from http://catalogue.pearsoned.co.uk/assets/hip/gb/hip_gb_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/FillC01.pdf
