Page 249 - DMGT408DMGT203_Marketing Management

Marketing Management/Essentials of Marketing

Notes 1. Planned messages: Planned messages are say messages, representing what companies say
about self. These messages represent typical marketing communications such as advertising,
personal selling, sales promotion, direct marketing, publicity, etc. Such messages often
have the least impact because they are viewed as marketer controlled and self-serving.
Planned messages should aim to accomplish the predetermined set of communications
objectives. This is the most basic aspect of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC).
2. Product messages: Product or service messages are do messages, as they communicate
what the company does. Messages from product, its price, and distribution elements are
referred to as the product messages.

Example: Customers and others receive totally different messages from ` 75 lakh BMW
and ` 2.36 lakh Maruti 800.
Product messages cause great impact because when a product performs as promised, the
consumer gets a positive and reinforcing message. On the other hand, if there is a gap
between the product’s performance and the communicated promises, the customer is
more likely to get a negative message.

3. Service messages: Company’s employee interactions with consumers also become a source
of messages. In many service-providing companies, customer service personnel are
supervised by operations, and not marketing. The service rendered sends messages, which
have greater impact than the planned messages.

4. Unplanned messages: Such messages are confirm messages as they represent what others
say and confirm/not confirm about what the company says and does. Companies have
little or no control over the unplanned messages that result from employee gossip, news
stories not under the control of the company, comments that traders or competitors pass
on, word-of-mouth communications, or major disasters. These unplanned messages,
favourable or unfavourable, may influence consumer attitudes quite significantly.
The objectives of integrated marketing communications are to coordinate all of a company’s
marketing and promotional efforts to project and reinforce a consistent, unified image of the
company or its brands to the market-place. The IMC approach is an attempt to improve over the
traditional method of treating promotion elements as totally separate activities. IMC is an
increasingly helping company to develop most suitable and effective methods to contact
customers and other interested groups.
Thomas R. Duncan and Sandra E. Moriarty have called IMC as one of the “new generation”
marketing approaches being used by companies to better focus their marketing efforts in
acquiring, retaining, and developing relationships with customers and other stakeholders. A
very important and fundamental reason, besides others, is the value of strategically integrating
different elements of communications functions and take advantage of the resulting synergy
among different tools in developing more effective and efficient marketing communication
programmes. Experts say that IMC is one of the easiest ways to maximise return on investment
in marketing and promotion. Tom Duncan and Steve Everett report that applying IMC in practice
is tough as it leads to turf wars between departments and though companies want to adopt this,
they do not know how to do it.

!
Caution Not all product concepts are right for all individuals, which observation introduces
the notion of market segmentation and targeting. The same holds true for marketing
communications. One message does not fit all. Integrated Marketing Communications
(IMC) focus on discrete customer segments. With IMC, the firm learns to understand that

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