Marketing Commnications Framework

Marketing communications are all the communications between the organization and all other parties. Part of the wider academic research area of marketing, it encompasses all the traditional forms of promotion including advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity and public relations. But it aims to be broader than this. It includes all points of contact between the organization and other parties. It includes everything from the way the telephone is answered, to the way the fleet of vehicles is maintained and used, to the quality of envolopes used.

It is commonly accepted that Integrated Marketing Communications should be the goal of such a marketing communications strategy. All points of contact with the organization should present the same corporate image. (Multiple Touch Points)

Integrated Marketing Communication is more than the coordination of a company's outgoing message between different media and the consistency of the message throughout. It is an aggressive marketing plan that captures and uses an extensive amount of customer information in setting and tracking marketing strategy. Steps in an Integrated Marketing system are:

1. Customer Database
   An essential element to implementing Integrated Marketing that helps to segment and analyze customer buying habits.
   
   
2. (a) Strategies
   Insight from analysis of customer data is used to shape marketing, sales, and communications strategies.
   
   (b). Tactics
   Once the basic strategy is determined the appropriate marketing tactics can be specified which best targets the specific markets.
   
   
3. Evaluate Results
   Customer responses and new information about buying habits are collected and analyzed to determine the effectiveness of the strategy and tactics.
   
   
4. Complete the loop; start again at #1.

Examples of Innovative Promotions

Billboard advertising has been around for decades. It is safe to say that they are no longer as effective as they used to be. Watching some new advertising techniques appear has made me realize that the memorable ads are the ones that really interact with life itself and are connecting to us in an emotional way.

A small list of the most striking ads of the last 6 months.

1. HUNGER AND THIRST: Magazine on a bottle
This could be how we get drinks for free in the future.
Have a coke. Have a smile.

2. SUPRISE! Peephole Pizza Guy
Nice alternative to the stacks of flyers we all have

3. PATIENCE & CURIOSITY - Conveyor belt ads
I’m sure you’ll want to see the entire belt before you leave the store

Nice alternative to the stacks of flyers we all have

à Innovative promo leading to a better recall for Papa

4. PLAYFULNESS - Wonderbra magazine ad
Have a feel of what a wonderbra would look like

5. CLEVERNESS - Fun shopping bags
There are tons like these.
All of them play on either (1) how they interact with the person
or (2) how the bag interacts with the print

Promotions along with below the line marketing are spreading like a craze. Infact, what was initially an effective tool to catch up with people in the rural India who had limited access to the other mediums like Press, TV and Radio has become an indispensable part of every marketing tool even for the urban India., though there is a considerable change in the presentation and approach. Companies are throwing in just about anything to boost their branding and sales. From Tangibles to the intangibles, everything is being effectively exploited. From Air tickets to the most happening sporting events in India and abroad, Entry passes to the hip discos & pubs etc. to holiday packages to the most exotic locales, the consumer is being wooed with just about everything.

Reverse Marketing: Pepsi's Website

Ever heard of a brand that rejects customers? Not intentionally atleast from the marketer’s perspective. Brands are uniformly desperate to attract them. So why would a big brand like Pepsi take the opposite approach?

"Reverse marketing is the concept of making potential customers seek you out instead of the other way around."

Pepsi needed to revamp its website for a re-launch. The solution was extracted from a simple proposition: Kids love challenges. It became the basis for a highly unusual approach that aimed to reject Pepsi site visitors rather than embrace them.

To enter the site, visitors were required to pass an intelligence test. If their answers weren't clever enough, quick enough, or simply correct, the site rejected them. If visitors succeeded in getting in, there were prizes. The assignment proved that reverse marketing could be used as an effective tool. Thousands of kids tried to enter the site every day. And thousands of rejected visitors spread rumours about "backdoors" into the site that allowed users to bypass the test.

The site was an instant hit.

The "Pepsi challenge" was turned on its head. Suddenly, it was directed at the brand's customers instead of its competitors. Probably for the first time in corporate brand history, the challenge defeated and rejected most aspiring visitors.

Product Placement

Product placement is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the good or service is featured. The latest trend in advertising is to make it, well, less advertorial. The tendency is to move away from inyour-face ads, where the product is the star, to mini-movies or quasidocumentary vignettes that feature "real-life scenarios" with the product(s) hovering in the background. Some would argue it's a sort of "art imitating art imitating life" scenario -- where ads are imitating the practice of product placement. Basically, there are three ways product placement can occur: • It simply happens. • It's arranged, and a certain amount of the product serves as compensation. • It's arranged, and there is financial compensation. BOLLYWOOD AND HOLLYWOOD PROMOTIONAL MANIA Companies are using movies as a medium to promote their brands regularly in Bollywood. These types of promotions have been prevalent in Hollywood for quite some time now and Indian marketers have started testing this innovative mode of promotion. Movies like James Bond have tie-ups with global brands like BMW and Omega. The studio and the filmmakers can these days even get selective and specific in terms of the creative content for tie-ins, feeling they need to be organic to the genius of the writing of the movie, and not too many partners can pull that off. The task was to announce the movie as an event and creating an event. It wasn't about lining up as many partners as possible; it was about having the right partners in the right context and the right message. Lage Raho Munnabhai is a classic Indian example where the title of the movie was changed from its initial offering because of the tie-up with Alpenlibe. Go Air also was prominent in the same movie. One of the latest movies; ChakDe India has brands like Puma, ESPN, Greyhound etc being a part of the various others being promoted in the movie. The collaboration made perfect sense for Puma due to the significance of the Hockey context. Another international example is Simpsons the Movie. Timex, JetBlue airlines and various other brands. Sony Ericsson majorly used Spiderman 3 and James Bond to position itself further as a model filled with the latest savvy features a mobile can provide. Products that can be advertised in this fashion range from cars to soft drinks, clothes to cigarettes. The cigarettes case is particularly interesting since tobacco advertising is actually banned in many countries.

Non Sales Revenue in Modern Retail

Non Sales Revenue form a good percentage of the revenue generated for Organized retailers. This concept is ever prevalent in the US where in-store advertising and the fight for best visible shelf space has been around for a while.

The non sales revenue earn upto 45% of the operating profits in the case of big retailers like Big Bazaar and even smaller ones like ITC's Choupal Saagar.

In Store:

• Shop - in - Shop
  
• Gandola advertising
• Glow Signs
• Display Signage
• Impulse bins
• Product display space

Outside Store:

• Show Window
• Store front-facia
• Kiosk

All these modes bring in money in the form of non-core activities. The leveraging power of the Retailer kicks in here.

There are certain brands which are strong enough to be placed where they want to be placed and still pay minimal if any to the Retailer.
A simple example is Cadbury's: Majority of the retailers place Cadbury coolers at impulse points and near the cashier without the company having to pay retailer for that space.








An example of a Shop-in-Shop is shown here, where Music World has set up a counter inside a bigger Retail outlet.









There is also a famous case of Allen Solly and Shoppers Stop, where the latter stopped stocking the famous former brand because of the low non-sales revenue agreement. Allen Solly wanted the best space in the store since it is perceived to be one of the best premium brands, but the premium it offered to Shoppers Stop was significantly low.