Page 237 - DMGT408DMGT203_Marketing Management

Marketing Management/Essentials of Marketing

Notes The marketing manager needs to communicate and promote the final product to consumers
through various channels of communication. He has to make sure that all the channels and
methods of communication present a unified message about the product or service of the firm.
Some twenty years ago, the idea of ‘integrated marketing communication’ emerged in
management literature. It is necessary to develop marketing communication strategy to obtain
a competitive strategic position for the company. In this unit, you will learn how the marketing
communications programme is developed and what does integrated marketing communication
imply.

10.1 Marketing Communication

Marketing communications is one of the four major elements of the company’s marketing mix.
Marketers must know how to use advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations,
and personal selling to communicate the product’s existence and value to the target customers.
The communication process itself consists of nine elements: sender, receiver, encoding, decoding,
message, media, response, feedback, and noise. Marketers must know how to get through to the
target audience in the face of the audience’s tendencies toward selective attention, distortion,
and recall.

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Caution Developing the promotion program involves eight steps. The communicator
must first identify the target audience and its characteristics, including the image it carries
of the product. Next, the communicator has to define the communication objective, whether
it is to create awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, or purchase. A message
must be designed containing an effective content, structure, format, and source. Then
communication channels both personal and non-personal must be selected. Next, the total
promotion budget must be established. Four common methods are the affordable method,
the percentage-of-sales method, the competitive-parity method, and the objective-and-task
method.
The promotion budget should be divided among the main promotional tools, as affected by
such factors as push-versus-pull strategy, buyer readiness stage, product life-cycle stage and
company market rank. The marketer should then monitor to see how much of the market
becomes aware of the product, tries it, and is satisfied in the process. Finally, all of the
communications effort must be managed and coordinated for consistency, good timing, and
cost effectiveness.

10.1.1 What is Promotion?

Modern marketing calls for more than just developing a good product, pricing it attractively,
and making it available to target customers. Companies must also communicate with their
customers, and what and how they communicate should not be left to chance. For most companies,
the question is not whether to communicate, but how much to spend and in what ways.
“Promotion is the co-ordination of seller’s aim to set up channels of information and persuasion
to facilitate the sales of goods/services or acceptance of an idea”.
“It includes all those activities which are aimed at creating and stimulating demand”.
In our daily life we all are exposed to various tools of promotion aiming at communicating one
thing or the other to us.

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