Marketing communication is like
a mobile phone When you think about your mobile, you probably don’t
use it much as a phone. It is a place to share your photos. To
hang out with your friends. A place to find information. A
weather bureau or city map. A distraction during boring
lectures. It’s not called a ‘smartphone’ for nothing. Your
mobile does a whole lot of things in one small package.
So it is with integrated marketing communication (IMC),
where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
If we consider marketing communication as a whole,
rather than planning each marketing communication
discipline, such as advertising or public relations, in
isolation, then we should generate some synergy. So it is with the four parts of this text. You could
read one or another part of this text, depending on
what your exam covered, and you would no doubt gain
some value. But there is much greater understanding
to be gleaned from reading the whole text (and this
Australian and New Zealand version is some six
chapters shorter than its US cousin). For example, Part 1 puts marketing communication
in context; or more specifically, in the unique context of
Australia and New Zealand. It starts where marketing
communication began in Australia and New Zealand—
with advertising—and takes us from the very first
advertising poster ever written in Australia to the latest
trends in digital advertising and social media in Australia
and New Zealand. It looks at advertising as a process, as
an industry and as a place to work. Chapter 2 moves
forward to the next step in marketing communication
evolution: it looks at how the supremacy of advertising
has been challenged by fragmented audiences and
the decline of mass media. It introduces integrated
marketing communication (IMC) as an answer to
changing consumer, technology, media and business
needs. Chapter 3 and 4 are new chapters that explore
digital and social media, offering examples to astound
you and theories to help you understand them. Part 2 begins with an overview of the communication
process and examines basic communication theories and models. Then you start where all good
IMC campaigns start—with the consumer—and look
at how great research can develop consumer insight
and drive effective marketing communication. Part
of understanding the consumer is to gauge their
relationship with the brand—what the brand means
to them—and then to build this brand awareness into
a long-term relationship by strategically incorporating
into it the role of the database. Once you understand the context and how
marketing communication works, you can begin to
plan your strategy with confidence and decide upon
your tactics, as discussed in Part 3. Five chapters
support you in this process. Chapter 9 looks at the
planning process and how you develop IMC strategy.
Objective-setting and budget decisions are made in
Chapter 10. This sets the direction for your message
strategy in Chapter 11, which tells you what to say, and
your media strategy and media choices in Chapter 12,
which tells you where and when to say it. Of course,
an important part of making decisions is knowing
that they are the right ones. Chapter 13 evaluates
marketing communication effectiveness, which then
further adds to your understanding of how marketing
communication works. Throughout this planning process, you integrate
strategy, message and media across a number of
different marketing communication disciplines. In
Part 4 these disciplines are examined in detail, looking
at direct marketing, personal selling, public relations
and sales promotion. Each part makes an important contribution to our
understanding, and has almost as many features as
your mobile. You could just study the part on marketing
communication planning, but without understanding
how marketing communications works, your planning
will be less successful. Without appreciating the unique
context in Australia and New Zealand, your application
of marketing communication disciplines will be more
haphazard. So the first lesson in IMC is in synergy: read
all of the text. Your knowledge and understanding of
its parts will then be much greater. |