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Marketing communications are the means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers about the products and brands they sell. In a sense, marketing communications represent the voice of the company and its brands.

Marketing communications can:

•help firms establish a dialogue and build relationships with consumers and strengthen customer loyalty,  and thus contribute to customer equity.

•work for consumers when by showing how and why a product is used, by whom, where, and when. Consumers can learn who makes the product and what the company and brand stand for, and they can get an incentive for trial or use.

•allow companies to link their brands to other people, places, events, brands, experiences, feelings, and things.

•contribute to brand equity by establishing the brand in memory and creating a brand image.

•drive sales and even affect shareholder value.

The marketing communications mix consists of eight major modes of communication.

The way brand associations are formed does not matter. Marketing communications activities must be integrated to deliver a consistent message and achieve the strategic positioning.

The starting point in planning marketing communications is a communication audit that profiles all interactions customers in the target market may have with the company and all its products and services.

To implement the right communications programs and allocate dollars efficiently, marketers need to assess which experiences and impressions will have the most influence at each stage of the buying process.

In building brand equity, marketers should be “media neutral” and evaluate all communication options on effectiveness (how well does it work?) and efficiency (how much does it cost?).

Figure 17.1 shows a macromodel with nine key factors in effective communication.

Two are major parties— sender and receiver.

Two are major tools—message and media.

Four are  major communication functions—encoding, decoding, response, and feedback.

One is noise, random and competing messages that may interfere with the intended communication.

Senders must know what audiences they want to reach and what responses they want to get. They must encode their messages so the target audience can decode them. They must transmit the message through media that reach the target audience and develop feedback channels to monitor the responses. The more the sender’s field of experience overlaps that of the receiver, the more effective the message is likely to be.

Figure 17.1 shows a macromodel with nine key factors in effective communication.

Two are major parties— sender and receiver.

Two are major tools—message and media.

Four are  major communication functions—encoding, decoding, response, and feedback.

One is noise, random and competing messages that may interfere with the intended communication.

Senders must know what audiences they want to reach and what responses they want to get. They must encode their messages so the target audience can decode them. They must transmit the message through media that reach the target audience and develop feedback channels to monitor the responses. The more the sender’s field of experience overlaps that of the receiver, the more effective the message is likely to be.

Micromodels of marketing communications concentrate on consumers’ specific responses to communications. Figure 17.2 summarizes four classic response hierarchy models. By choosing the right sequence, the marketer can do a better job of planning communications.

•“learn-feel-do” sequence is appropriate when the audience has high involvement with a product category perceived to have high differentiation, such as an automobile or house.

•“do-feel-learn” is relevant when the audience has high involvement but perceives little or no differentiation within the product category, such as an airline ticket or personal computer.

•“learn-do-feel” is relevant when the audience has low involvement and perceives little differentiation, such as with salt or batteries. 

In the hierarchy-of-effects model (the second column of Figure 17.2), there are six steps involved in a marketing communications campaign. Assume each of the six steps has a 50% of chance of being successfully accomplished, the likelihood of all six steps occurring successfully is .5 × .5 × .5 × .5 × .5 × .5, which equals 1.5625 percent. If the probability of each step’s occurring were 10 percent, then the joint probability of all six events occurring is .0001 percent—or only 1 chance in 1,000,000!

To increase the odds for a successful marketing communications campaign, marketers must ensure that:

1. The right consumer is exposed to the right message at the right place and at the right time.

2. The ad causes the consumer to pay attention but does not distract from the intended message.

3. The ad properly reflects the consumer’s level of understanding of and behaviors with the product and the brand.

4. The ad correctly positions the brand in terms of desirable and deliverable points-of-difference and points-of-parity.

5. The ad motivates consumers to consider purchase of the brand.

6. The ad creates strong brand associations with all these stored communications effects so they can have an impact when consumers are considering making a purchase.

Figure 17.3 shows the eight steps in developing effective communications.

The target audience is a critical influence on the communicator’s decisions about what to say, how, when, where, and to whom.

Target audience can be profiled in terms of

•market segments (identified in Chapter 8)

•usage and loyalty

•brand knowledge

1.Category Need—Establishing a product or service category as necessary to remove or satisfy a perceived discrepancy between a current motivational state and a desired motivational state.

2.Brand Awareness—Fostering the consumer’s ability to recognize or recall the brand within the category, in sufficient detail to make a purchase.

3.Brand Attitude—Helping consumers evaluate the brand’s perceived ability to meet a currently relevant need.

4.Brand Purchase Intention—Moving consumers to decide to purchase the brand or take purchase-related action. 

Message strategy: buyers expected one of four types of reward from a product: rational, sensory, social, or ego satisfaction. Management searches for appeals, themes, or ideas that will tie in to the brand positioning and help establish points-of-parity or points-of-difference.

Creative strategy are the way marketers translate their messages into a specific communication. They can be classified as either an informational appeal that elaborates on product or service attributes or benefits or a transformational appeal that elaborates on a nonproduct-related benefit or image.

Message source: messages delivered by attractive or popular sources can achieve higher attention and recall, which is why advertisers often use celebrities as spokespeople.

Personal communications channels let two or more persons communicate face-to-face or person-to-audience through a phone, surface email, or e-mail. They derive their effectiveness from individualized presentation and feedback and include direct and interactive marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and personal selling.

Nonpersonal channels are communications directed to more than one person and include advertising, sales promotions, events and experiences, and public relations.

Competitive-parity method: set budget to achieve share-of-voice parity with competitors.

Affordable method: set budget at what the company can afford.

Percentage-of-sales method: set expenditures at a specified percentage of current or anticipated sales or of the sales price.

Objective-and-task method: develop budgets by defining specific objectives, determining the tasks that must be performed to achieve these objectives, and estimating the costs of performing them. The sum of these costs is the proposed communication budget.

Companies must allocate budget over various modes of communication. Within the same industry, companies can differ considerably in their media and channel choices. The substitutability among communications tools requires marketing functions  to be coordinated.

Each communication tool has its own unique characteristics and costs. The elements of the communication mix will be covered in more depth in chapters 18 & 19. Here are some of the key observations or characteristics of each.

Type of product market - Consumer marketers tend to spend more on sales promotion and advertising; business marketers tend to spend more on personal selling.

Buyer readiness stage - Advertising and publicity play the most important roles in the awareness-building stage. Customer comprehension is primarily affected by advertising and personal selling. Customer conviction is influenced mostly by personal selling. Closing the sale is influenced mostly by personal selling and sales promotion. Reordering is also affected mostly by personal selling and sales promotion, and somewhat by reminder advertising.

product life cycle stage - In the introduction stage, advertising, events and experiences, and publicity have the highest cost-effectiveness, followed by personal selling to gain distribution coverage and sales promotion and direct marketing to induce trial. In the growth stage, demand has its own momentum through word of mouth and interactive marketing. Advertising, events and experiences, and personal selling all become more important in the maturity stage. In the decline stage, sales promotion continues strong, other communication tools are reduced, and salespeople give the product only minimal attention.

Figure 17.4 shows the relative cost-effectiveness of three communication tools.

Communications input need to be translated into intermediate outputs such as reach and frequency (the percentage of target market exposed to a communication and the number of exposures), recall and recognition scores, persuasion changes, and cost-per-thousand calculations. Ultimately, behavior-change measures capture the real payoff.

Communications impact is measured by the target audience response as to whether they recognize or recall the message, how many times they saw it, what points they recall, how they felt about the message, and what are their previous and current attitudes toward the product and the company. It could also be measured by audience behaviors  such as how many people bought the product, liked it, and talked to others about it.

Figure 17.5 provides an example of good feedback measurement.

Subaru wants to insure that the messages being sent from its advertising, direct response, sales people, and events and experiences provide clarity, consistency, and deliver the maximum impact.

Multi-vehicle, multi-stage campaigns through combining personal and nonpersonal communications channels  should be used to maximize impact and to increase message reach and impact. Promotions can be more effective when combined with advertising, for example.

Large ad agencies redefine themselves as communications companies that assist clients to improve their overall communications effectiveness by offering strategic and practical advice on many forms of communication. Many international clients such as IBM (Ogilvy), Colgate (Young & Rubicam), and GE (BBDO) have opted to put a substantial portion of their communications work through one full-service agency. The result is integrated and more effective marketing communications at a much lower total communications cost.