Marketing Communications
Chapter 1 : Marketing Communications-An Overview
Marketing Communications
Marketing Communication Mix
Advertising
Sales Promotion
Personal Selling
Publicity and Public Relations
Direct marketing
Sponsorships
Exhibitions
Packaging
Point-of-Purchase Displays
Internet
Word-of-Mouth
Corporate Identity
Factors Affecting the Marketing Communication Mix
Stages in the Product Life Cycle
Stages in Consumer’s Adoption Process
Nature of Competition
Marketing Communication Process.
Chapter Summary
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Marketing communications are the means by which marketers
try to inform, persuade and remind consumers, directly or indirectly, about
their brands they offer for sale. As competition increases and more and more
products reach their maturity stage, marketers are finding it difficult to
differentiate their products and services based on some tangible features. Thus
many of them are concentrating on developing creative marketing communications
that can inform, persuade and remind the customer about their products and
services.
Different businesses need different marketing communication tools to communicate
the desired message to their potential customers. Marketers find that it is no
longer possible for them to completely rely on a single marketing communication
tool like advertising, personal selling or publicity. |
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At present, marketers can develop a marketing communications mix consisting
of advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, public relations, direct
marketing, sponsorships, exhibitions, packaging, point-of-sale and
merchandising, Internet, word of mouth and corporate identity. The marketing
communication mix a firm selects for promoting its products depend on a
variety of internal and external factors.
The internal factors include the nature of the product, the promotion
objectives and the budget allocated for marketing activities. The external
factors include the legal environment (regulations) governing the marketing
activities of firms in their respective countries. Marketers also modify
their marketing communication mix to help the product in the various stages
of its life cycle; motivate the consumer depending on the buying stage he is
in and match the competitor’s moves in the market.
Marketers should have a clear understanding of the communication process,
its constituents and the channel dynamics while designing a communications
plan. A typical communication process involves the transfer of a message
from a sender to a receiver. In marketing context, the marketer who sponsors
the advertisement is deemed to be the sender and the receiver can be any
stakeholder of whom the sender wants to influence.
In general, the sender encodes a message and sends it across to the receiver
through a medium and the receiver when exposed to the medium decodes the
message and sends a feedback. The communication process might be interrupted
by various external or internal factors known as noise.
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Short Case Studies / Caselets