Chapter 6: Marketing Communication & Brand Equity

Marketing Communication

• Refers to the means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers about the brands they sell
• Can contribute to brand equity by:
  • Creating awareness of the brand
  • Linking points-of-parity and points-of-difference associations to the brand in consumers' memory
  • Eliciting positive brand judgments or feelings
  • Facilitating a stronger consumer-brand connection and brand resonance

The New Media Environment

• Has changed dramatically in recent years
• Traditional advertising media seem to be losing their grip
• Digital revolution has changed the way consumers learn and talk about brands
• Changing media landscape has forced marketers to re-evaluate how they should best communicate with consumers

Challenges in Designing Brand-Building Communications

• Require careful planning and creative knack
• Should be efficient and effective
• Able to contribute to brand equity

Information Processing Model of Communications

• For a person to be persuaded by any form of communication, the following steps must occur:
  • Exposure - Seeing or hearing communication
  • Attention - Noticing communication
  • Comprehension - Understanding the intended message
  • Yielding - Responding favorably to the message
  • Intentions - Planning to act in the desired manner of communication
  • Behavior - Actually acting in the desired manner

Marketing Communication Options

• Advertising
• Promotion
• Online Marketing Communications
• Events & Experiences

Advertising

• Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor
• Powerful means of creating strong, favorable, and unique brand associations and eliciting positive judgments and feelings
• Specific effects of advertising are difficult to quantify and predict, but they have strong power on brand sales

Types of Advertising Media

• Television
• Radio
• Print
• Direct Response
• Place

Television Advertising

• Advantages:
  • Effective means of vividly demonstrating product attributes and persuasively explaining their corresponding consumer benefits
  • Compelling means for dramatically portraying user and usage imagery, brand personality, emotions, and other brand intangibles
• Disadvantages:
  • Fleeting nature of the message and potentially distracting creative elements
  • Large number of ads and non-programming material on television creates clutter
  • Large number of channels creates fragmentation, and digital video recorders give viewers the means to skip commercials
  • High cost of production and placement

Radio Advertising

• Advantages:
  • Flexible and targeted
  • Relatively inexpensive to produce and place, and short closing allows quick responses
  • Effective medium in the morning and can effectively complement or reinforce TV ads
  • Enables companies to achieve a balance between broad and localized market coverage
• Disadvantages:
  • Lack of visual image
  • Relatively passive nature of consumer processing