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.