PBL Trigger 5

What is IMC and what does it mean for a company to follow IMC (is it a strategic or an operational tool)? Who are in charge of IMC?

Definition of Integrated Marketing Communications according to the business dictionary :

An approach to achieving the objectives of a marketing campaign, through a well-coordinated use of different promotional methods that are intended to reinforce each other. As defined by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, integrated marketing communications " ... recognizes the value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communication disciplines advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion and combines them to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communication impact."

Source: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/integrated-marketing-communications-IMC.html

According to the West Virginia University :

Simply, IMC attempts to unify all pieces of marketing communications, including, advertising, public relations, direct marketing, social media and sales promotion. It is designed to create messaging that is consistent across all channels. 

According to Angeles Navarro, Maria Sicilia and Elena Delgado-Ballester in their article Integrated Marketing Communications, Effects of advertising-sponsorship strategic consistency.

When a company  follows IMC it means that they need to have  strategic consistency. Strategic consistency refers to the extent to which information conveyed by different communications options share meaning

Paul Turner’s article: Implementing integrated marketing communications through major event ambassadors

For IMC to be implemented successfully, a number of issues need to be considered.

Planning of campaigns must be considered holistically, employees must be given new skills

and staff in the organisation need to understand the contribution each communication

element can make and understand how these elements affect the communication process

.

I think IMC is a strategic tool instead of an operational tool because IMC is setting the global strategy of what message all of your different marketing channels will communicate with the public. Each different marketing channel wil use a different operational approach to communicate with the public.

There are 4 stages of IMC as described in the model above.

 The first stage in the progression towards integrated marketing communications approach inside a company is a simple coordination across specialist areas, where they agree upon the use of a standard logo, a company slogan, corporate colors, and a general message.

It is likely that various areas of marketing communication – advertising, direct marketing, sales, online and social media, and public relations – still act quite independently, yet a similar look and feel and message.

Each of these functional areas would have their own goals and targets to achieve. For example, the advertising function might seek to improve brand awareness, the direct marketing area may be focused upon sales conversion rates, the public relations area might be measured upon earned media, and so on.

Despite these areas using a similar approach of message and brand elements, they still generally act independently and are not strategically integrated to achieve an overall goal.

Source : Advertising and Promotion written by Belch and Belch

in the second stage towards integrated marketing communications, the company starts to consider a broader set of touch points than its main communication tools (several of which were mentioned above).

In the first stage, the company is mainly concentrating upon the main communication tools. Second phase is when the company considers how and where a potential or current customer can become exposed or engaged with the brand.

For a company to effectively understand this range of potential interactions and exposures (brand contact or brand touch points) may become a little bit more research based and consider how consumers in different target markets end up becoming customers of their brands. Therefore, the company tries to look at the brand through the eyes of a consumer.

So in this stage, the company might consider email contact, interaction with staff, sponsorships, unplanned media attention, competitive comparisons, information and comparison websites, retail sales people, after sales service contacts, signage on buildings, staff uniforms, word-of-mouth, and so on -as all possibly being part of their customer’s journey towards or away from the brand.

The third stage is really trying to integrate the overall communications approach, as achieved in stages one and two, across the knowledge and practices of the organization. To do this, greater use of data and information is generated and shared across their distribution channels, even extending to their retailer and supplier partners.

Probably the best example of this would be in the banking sector, where the banking customer databases allow them to track each customer’s progression – either towards or away from using the company and certain products.

Obviously the goal is usually to increase share of customer in this progression can be identified relatively easily with today’s technology tools in a bank. Therefore, over time, with the use of information, a bank can get very effective about understanding and even predicting the customer’s behaviour when they come into contact with various marketing communications.

Part of this knowledge is built through market testing and experiments, where different communication mediums and messages and combinations are tested on a small scale before being ramped up and exposed to larger numbers of customers. Therefore, we end up with a relatively scientific approach to marketing communications.

The final stage really reflects that the overall marketing function inside a large company becomes strategically and financially integrated. The starting point for all marketing communications is essentially driven by the top-level strategic plan, which then feeds down to the marketing strategy and plan, which is then effectively executed through the marketing mix elements, including marketing communications.

Contrast this to the first stage listed above, there are various marketing communication specialists act relatively independently to achieve their own targets and KPI’s.

At this level of the final stage, not only are all the improvements from the previous three stages being implemented, but the organization becomes very financially and marketing metric driven in terms of its overall marketing communications. This would mean it would look at the ROI, for example, of increasing brand awareness by 5 percentage points – and work out what impact that has over time trial rates and brand loyalty and therefore bottom line impact.

This becomes increasingly challenging when companies have multiple target markets to pursue the need to consider a range of strategic initiatives. As pointed out earlier in the article, only explore percentage of organizations truly operate at the fourth stage of the model.

 

 

1.    What are the roles of the company and the different agencies
    (such as marketing/ brand/ communication/ advertising/media/research agencies) ?

The role of the different agencies is to give the client company advice on how to use the IMC strategy. When a client company struggles with implemting strategies or doing the right market research, they can hire the following agencies to help them with problems.

Marketing agencies :  marketing firm will plan out and implement a company’s marketing strategy. They often do market research and optimize sales letters. The goal of a marketing firm is to enhance the sales and profits of a company by not only providing more exposure but also by providing targeted exposure, which means reaching potential customers who are likely to be interested in the product or service being offered.

Source : https://www.balcomagency.com/blog/what-does-marketing-agency-actually-do

Source : https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-a-marketing-firm-4017678

Brand agencies : A branding agency will support your brand, by developing an understanding of your business, clarifying your goals and objectives and communicating this in the right way to the right audience. From this information they will help provide a strategy to grow your brand and provide you with the right toolkit to embed your brand purpose, values, promises, positioning, and identity into your organisation.

Source: http://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2016/06/what-is-a-branding-agency/

Advertising agency : Firm that (1) creates new promotional ideas, (2) designs print, radio, television, and internet advertisements, (3) books advertisement space and time, (4) plans and conducts advertising campaigns, (5) commissions research and surveys, and (6) provides other such services that help a client in entering and succeeding in a chosen market. In general, advertising agencies are not deemed agents of the advertisers, because they act as principals for the services they buy on behalf of their clients.

Source:  http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/advertising-agency.html

Communication agency : A communications firm helps companies hone and communicate their message, better reaching the target market for their products and services. In the case of this company, SpeakWell Communications, we focus almost exclusively on online communications.

Source: http://www.speakwellcommunications.com/what-the-is-a-communications-firm/

Media agency: a company that advises companies on how and where to advertise and on how to present a positive picture of themselves to the public

Source: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/media-agency?a=business-english

Research agency: A company offering market research services to clients, comprising a group of researchers and an administrative infrastructure. An agency may offer qualitative research, quantitative research, or both, increasingly supplemented by consultancy services, workshop facilitation and so on. Agencies vary in size from one or two individuals to several hundred people, though qualitative specialist agencies tend to be at the smaller end of this range.

Source : https://www.aqr.org.uk/glossary/market-research-agency

(golden triangle plaatje)

2.    How does/should the client company follow IMC? What are the roles of its different agencies?

I found three approaches to IMC

Inside-out approach

The inside-out approach focusess more on the company’s own capabilities and strengths

Outside-in approach

The Outside in strategy focusses on costumer value, focused on creating high calibre costumer value

Cross functional approach

The cross functional approach tries to combine the inside-out and outside-in approaches together to form strategy that takes care of the company’s internal and external stakeholders.

Source : https://brandmatters.com.au/blog/outside-in-and-inside-out-strategy

Schultz book called : imc the next generation

Gives 5 steps on how to start with implementing IMC into a company

1.        Identifying customers & prospects

2.       Valuation of customers/ prospects

3.       Creating & delivering messages and incentives

4.       Estimating return on customer investment

5.       Budgeting, allocation, and evaluation

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Ahmad Kareh wrote an article about 7 steps to better intergrate IMC into a company’s strategy

Source : https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/03/16/seven-steps-to-a-better-integrated-marketing-communications-strategy/#70af4b867841

Step 1: identify campaign goals and potential limitations

Step 2: Define the target audience

Step 3: Gain some insight

Make a SWOT analysis from the perspective of your target audience

Step 4: Understand your competition and identify your competitive edge

Step 5: Get creative

Brainstrom a lot of new ideas

Step 6: Check your big idea

Does your idea appeal to your audience and fit your strategy

Step 7 : Communicate

Define how you want to communicate your idea through the different mediums.