Marketing Communications and Integrated Approach

Although Integrated Marketing Communications requires a lot of effort it delivers many benefits. It can create a competitive advantage, boost sales and profits, while saving money, time and stress.

• IMC wraps communications around customers and helps them move through the various stages of the buying process.
• The organisation simultaneously consolidates its image, develops a dialogue and nurtures its relationship with customers.
• This ‘Relationship Marketing’ cements a bond of loyalty with customers which can protect them from the inevitable onslaught of competition.
• The ability to keep a customer for life is a powerful competitive advantage.

IMC also increases profits through increased effectiveness. At its most basic level, a unified message has more impact than a disjointed myriad of messages. In a busy world, a consistent, consolidated and crystal clear message has a better chance of cutting through the ‘noise’ of over five hundred commercial messages which bombard customers each and every day.

At another level, initial research suggests that images shared in advertising and direct mail boost both advertising awareness and mail shot responses. So IMC can boost sales by stretching messages across several communications tools to create more avenues for customers to become aware, aroused, and ultimately, to make a purchase

• Carefully linked messages also help buyers by giving timely reminders, updated information
• and special offers which, when presented in a planned sequence, help them move comfortably through the stages of their buying process…
• and this reduces their ‘misery of choice’ in a complex and busy world.
• IMC also makes messages more consistent and therefore more credible.
• This reduces risk in the mind of the buyer which, in turn, shortens the search process and helps to dictate the outcome of brand comparisons.

Communications Process

Most of us communicate easily/naturally, so we may not realise how complicated the process is.

In an organisational context, we have to find the most effective way to transmit ideas from one
person’s head into another’s.

The author – Schramm (1955) suggests a simple three-component
model of communication:

• Encoding – Designing the message to convey intended meaning.
• Noise – Influences that affect the quality of the original encoded message.
• Decoding – Interpreting the received message.

Noise

Noise – In marketing communications, the ‘noise’ that disturbs the reception of the message can be composed of general advertising ‘clutter’ or other factors, such as environmental distraction – just think about all that goes on in a typical home while the TV adverts are on.

Despite the best efforts of advertisers, viewers don’t pay the same attention to the commercial breaks that they do to the programmes themselves.

And the problem is exacerbated by the fact that many viewers these days record programmes to watch later, and ‘fast forward’ through ads whenever possible. The omnipresent mobile
phone is both an advertising medium and a form of noise: there’s too much happening on it for most users to bother trying to understand commercial messages arriving by text or email.

Encoding

Encoding – This is the process of developing a message in a language that the recipient will understand and engage with.

• Faulty coding can cause problems: when messages are mixed, inconsistent, confused or hard to understand the recipient will just ‘not get it’.
• An example is when advertisers try to adopt the language (and current slang) of teenagers in their advertising.
• Teenage language evolves so rapidly that it’s almost impossible to keep up – and therefore very easy to get advertising wrong.

Decoding and the importance of feedback

The message extracted by the recipient of the (advertising) communication is sometimes called ‘take-out’. It’s what people actually hear (and hopefully understand and believe) as a result of the original transmitted message.

Feedback from people who see ads is vitally important because it means marketers can adjust the content where necessary.

Feedback in marketing can take many forms: even complaints can be useful, and of course, customers can ‘vote with their pockets’ (or their mouse/finger online).

Marketers should ensure that they can monitor feedback from all marketing activities, including communications, in order to measure them against the results they expected or planned for.

If the message has not been decoded as intended, it is probably the fault of the brand owner or its agency and it should be withdrawn and/or changed so that it is more effective.