Chapter 14
Communicating Customer Value:
Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy
(P428-P449)

The Promotion Mix

Promotion mix (or marketing communications mix): The specific blend of promotion tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.

5 Major Promotion Tools:
Advertising: Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
* Includes broadcast, print, Internet, mobile, outdoor, and other forms.
Sales promotion: Short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.
* Includes discounts, coupons, displays, and demonstrations.
Personal selling: Personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
* Includes sales presentations, trade shows, and incentive programs.
Public relations (PR): Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image, and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events.
* Includes press releases, sponsorships, special events, and Web pages.
Direct marketing: Direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.
* Includes catalogs, direct-response TV, kiosks, the Internet, mobile marketing, etc.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC): Carefully integrating and coordinating the company’s many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its products.

* In past decades, marketers perfected the art of mass marketing: selling highly standardized products to masses of customers. In the process, they developed effective mass-media communications techniques to support these strategies. In television, magazine, or other mass-media advertising, reaching tens of millions of customers with a single ad.

The New Marketing Communications Model
Consumers are better informed [Get information by themselves.]
More communication [Connect more easily with other consumers to exchange brand-related information or even create their own marketing messages.]
Less mass marketing (Marketing strategy changes): As mass markets have fragmented, Marketers are developing focused marketing programs designed to build closer relationships with customers in more narrowly defined micromarkets.
Changing communications technology: Advertisers are now adding a broad selection of more-specialized and highly targeted media to reach smaller customer segments with more-personalized, interactive messages. Companies are doing less broadcasting and more narrowcasting.
* In some cases, marketers are skipping traditional media altogether.
* In the new marketing communications world, rather than using old approaches that interrupt customers and force-feed them mass messages, new media formats let marketers reach smaller groups of consumers in more interactive, engaging ways.
* Online advertising remains the fastest growing medium. It is now the second largest medium behind television, well ahead of newspapers and magazines.
* The new marketing communications model will consist of a shifting mix of both traditional mass media and a wide array of exciting, new, more-targeted, and more-personalized but sometimes less-controllable media.
* The key is to integrate all of these media in a way that best communicates the brand message and enhances the customer’s brand experience.

Brand content managers: who manage brand conversations with and among customers across a fluid mix of channels, both traditional and new, controlled and not controlled.

The Need for Integrated Marketing Communications

Consumers don’t distinguish between message sources the way marketers do. In the consumer’s mind, messages from