MBA Course Knowledge Center: Marketing Communications

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Marketing Communications

Authors

Narayana Rao

Marketing Includes Communication

Marketing includes understanding the needs and desires of the market and developing a good product with an attractive price focused at a segment of the potential market and making it accessible to the target customers. Marketing also includes the communication to the target customers regarding the availability of the product with benefits and features desired by them at locations convenient to them to purchase the item. For this purpose, the companies have to communicate with their present and potential customers and distribution channel partners. They need to communicate with general public as well as various stakeholders who come in contact with its distribution network. Media can be a stakeholder that is of importance in this context.

Communication Mix

The marketing communications mix consists of five major modes.

1. Advertising: It is any paid form of nonpersonal communication of ideas and information regarding products and services.

2. Personal Selling: It is face-to-face interaction with prospective customers.

3. Public Relations and Publicity: It is a communication originated from individuals and media not directly connected with the company and also it is not directly paid for. Individuals and media create this communication as a part of their natural or normal activity.

4. Direct Marketing Communication: In stead of personal selling where a company sales person or agent is involved, direct marketing uses channels like mail, fax, e-mail, telephone and other non-personal contact tools to communicate with the target customers.

5. Sales Promotion: Kotler includes sales promotion also in the marketing communication mix, as he uses the term marketing promotion mix also to describe marketing communications mix. In sales promotion, a variety of short-term incentives are offered to encourage people to make a trial purchase or a purchase of a product or service.

Communication

In marketing, there is now movement toward viewing communications as the management of the customer buying process over time, during the reselling, selling, consuming, and postconsuming stages. The focus marketing communications have broadened from the earlier focus on creating awareness about the product, improving the image of the company and creating a preference for the product of the company.

The Communication Model

To communicate effectively, marketers need to understand the fundamental elements underlying effective communication. The communication model has nine elements

Sender

Encoding

Message

Media

Noise

Decoding

Receiver

Response

Feedback

The model has all the key factors in making communication effective. Senders must know what audiences they want to reach and what responses from the audience they want.

The encoding of the message has to take into account the decoding process of the audience. Encoding process is the composition of the message. The message is designed by the sender to elicit a required response from the receiver. So there is a purpose in designing the message. The message has to be brief as the potential customer may not have time to read a big message. Within the brief message the the information that is to be conveyed is to be encoded. This brief message is decoded by the receiver. He expands the message and adds meaning to it. Hence the encoders need to have understanding of the decoding mechanism used by the receivers.

They must transmit the message through media that reaches the target audience and communicators need to have feedback channels to know how their communication process is performing apart from generating the responses in the form of buying of goods and services.

Developing Effective Communications

Eight steps in developing effective communications are:

1. Identify the target audience

2. Determine the communication objectives

3. Design the message

4. Select the communication channels

5. Establish the total promotion budget

6. Decide on the promotion mix

7. Measure the promotion results

8. Manage and coordinate the integrated marketing communication process

References

Philip Kotler, Marketing Management (Main text for revision and article)

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What is integrated marketing?
2008 video by Advmedia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsIvoJJ9njs
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