Page 245 - DMGT408DMGT203_Marketing Management

Marketing Management/Essentials of Marketing

Notes 10.3.3 Developing Effective Communications
The marketing communicators must (1) Identify the target audience (2) Determine the
communication objectives (3) Design the message and (4) Manage and coordinate the total
marketing communication process.
Identify the Target Audience

A marketing Communicator must start with a clear target audience in mind. The audience may
be potential buyers of the company’s products, current users, deciders, or influence. The audience
may be individuals, groups, particular publics or the general public. The target audience will
critically influence the communicators decision on what is to be said. How it is to be said, when
it is to be said, where is to be said and who is to say it.
The communicators should research the audience’s needs, attitudes, preference and other
characteristics as a prelude to setting communication objectives. One of the most important
things to establish is the audience’s current image of the object.

Image Analysis

A major part of audience is to assess the audience’s current image of the company, its product,
and its competitors. People’s attitudes and actions towards an object are highly conditioned by
their beliefs about the object. Image is the set of beliefs, ideas and impressions that a person
holds of an object.
The most popular tools for this is the semantic differential. It involves the following steps:
1. Developing a set of relevant dimensions
2. Reducing the set of relevant dimensions
3. Administering the instrument to a sample of respondents
4. Averaging the results
5. Checking on the image variance

The marketers should now develop a picture of the desired image in contrast to the current
image. An organization seeking to change its image must have great patience. Images persistence
is explained by the fact that once people have a certain image of an object; they tend to be
selective perceivers of further data.

Determining the Communication Objectives

Once the target audience and its characteristics are identified, the marketing communication must
determine what response is sought. The ultimate response of course, is purchase. But behavior is
the end result of a long process of consumer decision marking. The marketing communicator
needs to know how to move the target audience from where it now stands to a higher state of
readiness to buy. We will work with the “hierarchy-of-effects “models and described the six
buyer – readiness states Awareness, Knowledge, liking, Preference, Conviction, and Possible,
depending upon the degree of consumer involvement and the degree of brand differences.

Designing the Message
Having defined the desired audience response, the communicators moves to developing an
effective message. Ideally the message should get attention, hold interest, arouse desire and
obtain action. In practice, few messages take the consumer all the way from awareness through
purchase, but the frame work suggest the desirable qualities.

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