This chapter defines the five promotion mix tools for communicating customer value and also discusses the changing communications landscape and the need for integrated marketing communications.
This chapter further describes and discusses the major decisions involved in developing an advertising program. Finally, it explains how companies use public relations to communicate with their publics.
Chick-fil-A needed a creative big idea, something memorable that would communicate the brand’s unique value proposition. It came up with an improbable herd of renegade black-and-white cows that couldn’t spell. Their message: “Eat Mor Chikin.” Their goal was to convince consumers to switch from hamburgers to chicken. For nearly two decades, Chick-fil-A has stuck steadfastly to its simple but potent “Eat Mor Chikin” message, and the brand’s cows have now become pop culture icons. Building on the basic “Eat Mor Chikin” message, Chick-fil-A keeps the campaign fresh with an ever-changing mix of clever message executions and innovative media placements.
Although the “Eat Mor Chikin” campaign has made plentiful use of traditional media, it is perhaps the nontraditional promotional tactics that have won the cows a special place in the hearts of Chick-fil-A’s fiercely loyal customers. Chick-fil-A further engages customers through an assortment of in-store promotional events. Most recently, Chick-fil-A has taken its “Eat Mor Chikin” message to social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Promotion mix, or marketing communications mix, refers to the specific blend of promotion tools that the company uses to engage consumers, persuasively communicate customer value, and build customer relationships. There are five major promotion tools.
Advertising is any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor. Sales promotion involves short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service. Personal selling is personal customer interactions by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships. Public relations refers to 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. Direct and digital marketing involves engaging directly with carefully targeted individual consumers and customer communities to both obtain an immediate response and build lasting customer relationships.
Several major factors are changing the face of today’s marketing communications.
First, consumers are changing. In this digital, wireless world, consumers are better informed and more communications empowered. Rather than relying on marketer-supplied information, they can use the Internet, social media, and other technologies to find information on their own. Second, marketing strategies are changing. Marketers are developing focused marketing programs designed to build closer relationships with customers in more narrowly defined micromarkets. Finally, sweeping advances in digital technology are causing remarkable changes in the ways companies and customers communicate with each other. For example, when Rovio Entertainment introduced the Angry Birds Space version of its popular game, it used only online video. It began by posting a 20-second video teaser containing only the game title and launch date—that video landed 2.2 million views.
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 communities of consumers in more interactive, engaging ways.
The new marketing communications model will consist of a shifting mix of both traditional mass media and a wide array of online, mobile, and social media that engage highly targeted consumer communities in a more-personalized, interactive way.
Rather than just creating and placing TV ads or print ads or Facebook display ads, many marketers now view themselves more broadly as brand content managers. They create, inspire, and share brand messages and conversations with and among customers across a fluid mix of paid, owned, earned, and shared communications channels. These channels include media that are both traditional and new, and controlled and not controlled.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) refers to integrating and coordinating the company’s many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its products.
This figure illustrates how a company carefully integrates its many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its brands.
Each promotion tool has unique characteristics and costs.
Advertising can reach masses of geographically dispersed buyers at a low cost per exposure, and it enables the seller to repeat a message many times. Because of advertising’s public nature, consumers tend to view advertised products as more legitimate. Advertising is also very expressive. On the one hand, advertising can be used to build up a long-term image for a product. On the other hand, advertising can trigger quick sales. Advertising also has some shortcomings. Although it reaches many people quickly, advertising is impersonal and lacks the direct persuasiveness of company salespeople.
Personal selling involves personal interaction between two or more people, so each person can observe the other’s needs and characteristics and make quick adjustments. Personal selling also allows all kinds of customer relationships to spring up, ranging from matter-of-fact selling relationships to personal friendships. Personal selling is also the company’s most expensive promotion tool.
Sales promotion includes a wide assortment of tools like coupons, contests, discounts, premiums, and others, all of which have many unique qualities. They attract consumer attention, offer strong incentives to purchase, and can be used to dramatize product offers and boost sagging sales. Sales promotions invite and reward quick response. However, sales promotion effects are often short lived.
Public relations are news stories, features, sponsorships, and events that seem more real and believable to readers than ads do. PR can also reach many prospects who avoid salespeople and advertisements. It can dramatize a company or product. A well-thought-out public relations campaign used with other promotion mix elements can be very effective and economical.
The many forms of direct and digital marketing—from direct mail, catalogs, and telephone marketing to online, mobile, and social media—all share some distinctive characteristics. Direct marketing is more targeted: It’s usually directed to a specific customer or customer community. Direct marketing is immediate and personalized. Direct marketing is interactive. Thus, direct and digital marketing are well suited to highly targeted marketing efforts, creating customer engagement, and building one-to-one customer relationships.
This figure contrasts the two basic promotion mix strategies: push promotion or pull promotion. The relative emphasis given to the specific promotion tools differs for push and pull strategies.
A push strategy refers to a promotion strategy that calls for using the sales force and trade promotion to push the product through channels. The producer promotes the product to channel members that in turn promote it to final consumers.
A pull strategy refers to a promotion strategy that calls for spending a lot on consumer advertising and promotion to induce final consumers to buy the product, creating a demand vacuum that pulls the product through the channel.
Business-to-consumer companies pull more, putting more of their funds into advertising, followed by sales promotion, personal selling, and then public relations. Business-to-business marketers tend to push more, putting more of their funds into personal selling, followed by sales promotion, advertising, and public relations.
This figure shows the four important decisions made by marketing management developing an advertising program. These decisions include setting advertising objectives, setting the advertising budget, developing advertising strategy, that is, message decisions and media decisions, and evaluating advertising campaigns.
Advertising objective refers to a specific communication task to be accomplished with a specific target audience during a specific period of time.
Advertising objectives can be classified by their primary purpose which is, to inform, persuade, or remind. This table lists the examples of each of these specific objectives.
Informative advertising is used heavily when introducing a new product category. Persuasive advertising becomes more important as competition increases. And, reminder advertising is important for mature products; it helps to maintain customer relationships and keep consumers thinking about the product.
An advertising budget refers to the dollars and other resources allocated to a product or a company advertising program. There are four common methods used to set the total budget for advertising.
The affordable method refers to setting the promotion budget at the level management thinks the company can afford.
The percentage-of-sales method refers to setting the promotion budget at a certain percentage of current or forecasted sales or as a percentage of the unit sales price.
The competitive-parity method refers to setting the promotion budget to match competitors’ outlays.
The objective-and-task method involves developing the promotion budget by defining specific objectives, determining the tasks that must be performed to achieve these objectives, and estimating the costs of performing these tasks. The sum of these costs is the proposed promotion budget.
Advertising strategy refers to the strategy by which the company accomplishes its advertising objectives. It consists of two major elements, that is, creating advertising messages and selecting advertising media.
Clutter in television and other ad media has created an increasingly hostile advertising environment.
Many marketers have subscribed to a new merging of advertising and entertainment, called Madison & Vine. It represents the merging of advertising and entertainment to create new avenues for reaching customers with more engaging messages. Advertainment aims to make ads so entertaining that people want to watch them. Branded entertainment or brand integration involves making the brand an inseparable part of some other form of entertainment.
The first step in creating effective advertising messages is to plan a message strategy, that is, the general message that will be communicated to consumers. The advertiser must next develop a compelling creative concept that will bring the message strategy to life in a distinctive way. The creative concept will guide the choice of specific appeals to be used in an advertising campaign.
The message can be presented in various execution styles like the slice of life, lifestyle, fantasy, mood or image, musical, personality symbol, technical expertise, scientific evidence, and testimonial evidence or endorsement.
User-generated content can incorporate the voice of the customer into brand messages and generate greater customer engagement.
Advertising media refers to the vehicles through which advertising messages are delivered to their intended audiences. Four steps are involved in selection.
To select media, the advertiser must determine the reach and frequency needed to achieve the advertising objectives. Reach is a measure of the target market exposed to the ad campaign during a given period of time. Frequency is a measure of how many times the average person in the target market is exposed to the message. The advertiser also must determine the desired media impact of message exposure through a given medium.
Media planners must consider each medium’s impact, message effectiveness, and cost. An important trend affecting media selection is the rapid growth in the number of media multitaskers, people who absorb more than one medium at a time.
Media planners must also choose specific media within each general media type. In selecting specific media vehicles, media planners must balance media costs against several media effectiveness factors like audience quality, audience engagement, and editorial quality.
An advertiser must also decide how to schedule the advertising over the course of a year. The advertiser must choose the pattern of the ads—continuity or pulsing.
This table lists the advantages and limitations of two major media types, newspapers and direct mail.
This table lists the advantages and limitations of three major media types: magazines, radio, and outdoor.
The mix of media must be reexamined regularly. Today’s marketers want to assemble a full mix of paid, owned, earned, and shared media that create and deliver brand content to target consumers.
Measuring advertising effectiveness and the return on advertising investment has become a hot issue for most companies, especially in a challenging economic environment. Return on advertising investment refers to the net return on advertising investment divided by the costs of the advertising investment. Advertisers should regularly evaluate two types of advertising results: the communication effects and the sales and profit effects.
Measuring the communication effects of an ad or ad campaign tells whether the ads and media are communicating the ad message well. After an ad is run, the advertiser can measure how the ad affected consumer recall or product awareness, knowledge, and preference.
Sales and profit effects of advertising are often harder to measure. One way to measure the sales and profit effects of advertising is to compare past sales and profits with past advertising expenditures. Another way is through experiments.
Because so many factors affect advertising effectiveness, some controllable and others not, measuring the results of advertising spending remains an inexact science.
Different companies organize in different ways to handle advertising. In small companies, advertising might be handled by someone in the sales department. Large companies have advertising departments whose job it is to set the advertising budget, work with the ad agency, and handle other advertising not done by the agency.
An advertising agency is a marketing services firm that assists companies in planning, preparing, implementing, and evaluating all or portions of their advertising programs. Agencies also bring an outside point of view to solving the company’s problems, along with lots of experience from working with different clients and situations. Most large advertising agencies have the staff and resources to handle all phases of an advertising campaign for their clients. Large brands commonly employ several agencies that handle everything from mass-media advertising campaigns to shopper marketing and social media content.
International advertisers face many complexities not encountered by domestic advertisers. The most basic issue concerns the degree to which global advertising should be adapted to the unique characteristics of various country markets.
Standardization produces many benefits like lower advertising costs, greater global advertising coordination, and a more consistent worldwide image. But it also has drawbacks. It ignores the fact that country markets differ greatly in their cultures, demographics, and economic conditions. Thus, most international advertisers think globally but act locally. They develop global advertising strategies that make their worldwide efforts more efficient and consistent.
Global advertisers face several special problems. For instance, advertising media costs and availability differ vastly from country to country. Countries also differ in the extent to which they regulate advertising practices. Many countries have extensive systems of laws restricting how much a company can spend on advertising, the media used, the nature of advertising claims, and other aspects of the advertising program. Such restrictions require advertisers to adapt their campaigns from country to country.
PR departments may perform any or all of the following functions.
Creating and placing newsworthy information in the news media to attract attention to a person, product, or service.
Publicizing specific products.
Building and maintaining national or local community relationships.
Building and maintaining relationships with legislators and government officials to influence legislation and regulation.
Maintaining relationships with shareholders and others in the financial community.
Working with donors or members of nonprofit organizations to gain financial or volunteer support.
Public relations is used to promote products, people, places, ideas, activities, organizations, and even nations. Companies use PR to build good relations with consumers, investors, the media, and their communities. Trade associations have used PR to rebuild interest in commodities. For example, the Vidalia Onion Committee built a PR campaign around the DreamWorks character Shrek that successfully promoted onions to children. Even government organizations use PR to build awareness. For example, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health sponsors a long-running PR campaign that builds awareness of heart disease in women.
Public relations can have a strong impact on public awareness at a much lower cost than advertising can. When using public relations, the company pays for a staff to develop and circulate information and manage events. Public relations has the power to engage consumers and make them a part of the brand story and its telling.
Despite its potential strengths, public relations has limited and scattered use. This situation is changing, however. Although public relations still captures only a small portion of the overall marketing budgets of most firms, PR can be a powerful brand-building tool. PR should work hand in hand with advertising within an integrated marketing communications program to help build customer engagement and relationships.
Public relations uses several tools.
PR professionals find or create favorable news about the company and its products or people.
Another PR tool is special events, like news conferences and speeches, brand tours, and grand openings, laser light shows, multimedia presentations, or educational programs designed to reach and interest target publics.
PR also involves the preparation of written materials like annual reports, brochures, and company newsletters and magazines to reach and influence target markets.
Audiovisual materials, such as DVDs and online videos, are also being used increasingly as communication tools.
Corporate identity materials can also help create a corporate identity that the public immediately recognizes. Logos, stationery, brochures, signs, business forms, business cards, buildings, uniforms, and company cars and trucks all become marketing tools when they are attractive, distinctive, and memorable.
Finally, companies can improve public goodwill by contributing money and time to public service activities.
