Marketing Communication: Brand Story & Channels

• Project groups should avoid mega brands, top performers, and over-studied brands
• Project groups should consider new, unknown, or local brands

Marketing Communications

• Ways a company communicates its brand story to its target audience to achieve marketing objectives
• Transaltes a brand's value proposition through narratives which attract customers and encourage action
• Includes all messages and media used to engage consumers and build relationships

Qualities of Great Marketing Communications

• Consumer-centric, insight-driven, culturally relevant, and co-created with consumers
• Includes clearly defined and strategically aligned objectives
• Employs storytelling and creativity to bring brand narratives to life
• Contains engaging, entertaining, and attention-grabbing content
• Distinctive and consistent brand identity in the right place at the right time
• Messaging should be consistent across channels

Marketing Communications Channels

• Advertising
• Sales promotions
• Digital and direct marketing
• Public relations
• Content Marketing

Categories of Marketing Communications

• Targeted & Customized: Addresses specific individual needs
• Mass Communications: Reaches a wide, undifferentiated audience
• One-way Communications: Delivers messages without expecting immediate feedback
• Two-way Communications: Encourages interaction, feedback, and engagement

Role of Marketing Communications

• Informs, persuades, and reminds customers of a brand’s value proposition
• Prompts consumers to "think" or "feel" something that leads to action
• Moves prospective customers along the decision-making process from awareness to purchase

The Funnel

• Stages from Awareness to Knowledge to Preference to Purchase Decision
• Includes stages Positive Liking and Conviction Formed

Value Proposition

• Articulates the unique customer values of a product or service
• The reason a customer chooses a brand over others
• Should be customer-centric, framing value around customer needs, and be created for each key customer segment

Influences on Value

• Outside influences: market dynamics and category drivers plus customer pains, gains, and jobs
• Inside influences: features and benefits, plus reasons to believe or evidence
• Together, these influences create brand value

Hierarchy of Effects

• Addresses different needs at each stage (cognitive, affective, behavioral)
• Consumers may move back and forth or skip stages
• Different consumers, services, and occasions require different journeys

Right Message, Right Person, Right Time

• Requires consideration of customer journey, channels and tool selection
• Must capture attention at various touchpoints in a non-linear fashion
• Different journeys require different tools and channels

Marketing Communications in Marketing Strategy

• Two main objectives
• Brand Building: Focuses on awareness and equity over a longer timeframe
• Performance Driving: Focuses on specific actions and conversions in real-time

Objective Metrics

• Brand Building: measured by awareness, perception, and loyalty across all channels
• Content focuses on storytelling, emotional brand values, targeting a broad audience with high upfront investment
• Performance Driving: measured by quantifiable metrics and Return-On-Investment primarily through digital channels
• Content focuses on a call to action, targeting refined audiences adjustable based on performance
• Both is important for sustainable growth

IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications)

• Strategic process for managing communication tools with a unified strategy that is aligned with marketing and business objectives
• Aims involve selection and coordination of tools/channels to communicate with current and prospective customers
• Cuts through clutter and ensures message consistency across platforms, boosting marketing effectiveness

Benefits of IMC

• Allows targeted messaging to specific audiences while maintaining a unified theme
• Avoids confusion and dilution of brand messaging
• Aligns communication with marketing and business objectives, enhancing efficiency and ROI
• Enables delivery of the right message to the right person at the right time

6M Framework for Developing IMC

• A structured approach to developing integrated marketing communications strategies that encompass 3 stages and 6 steps

3 Stages of IMC

• Stage 1: Planning covers Mission, Market, and Money
• Stage 2: Execution covers Message and Media
• Stage 3: Impact covers Measurement.

Stage 1: Planning

• Mission: Set campaign objectives and behavior changes communication needs to achieve
• Set Direction by providing clarity/purpose for all marketing communication efforts
• Create Consistency across all communication activities
• Objectives are Aligned with communications, marketing, and business strategic goals
• Target by ensuring messaging and content are relevant to the intended audience(s)

Planning: Market

• Identify and define a target audience to ensure targeted, relevant, and effective message delivery
• Target Audience ID: Identify the specific group or customer type, whether existing or prospective
• Develop an Understanding of the Market (Create detailed understanding of the target audience/s; Go beyond demographics to deep insight)
• Segmentation (Segment the broader target into smaller groups with similar needs and characteristics for more accurate targeting)
• This should be aligned with the customer decision-making journey
• Strategy Execution (Informs campaign message and how brand narrative is brought to life, media selection and allocation of resources)

Stage 2: Execution

• Message: Craft content communicating specific points that resonate and achieve objectives
• Should include content development of specific information, ideas, or narratives
• Identify the Customer Journey, determine different messages required by different audiences/ channels

Messaging

• Engagement & Appeal (structure messages to maximize persuasion for each target audience: build on deep audience understanding and insight)
• Consistency (all messages although different should be consistent and create a unified brand image and brand story))
• Media channels must deliver the message to the target audience effectively and efficiently

Channel selection

• Optimum media mix delivers the right message to the right person in the right place
• Should consider targeted versus mass media, and one-way versus two-way communication effectiveness.
• Should reflect on the objectives to be delivered and the cost of the delivery to maximize Return-On-Investment
• Must be integrated and coordinated across multiple channels

Stage 3: Impact

• Determine the budget required/allocated to achieve communication objectives
• Budget Determination (Agree on the strategic approach to set the budget and determine the money dedicated to communication plans)
• Budget Allocation (Determine how the budget will be divided among different tools and channels to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness)
• Assess how well communications achieved its objectives and whether marketing budget was spent effectively

Measure & Track

• Assessment of Impact: Tracking the right data to determine impact against goal
• Financial Accountability and Continuous Improvement are important
• Data-Driven Decisions (Insights informs future marketing decisions)
• Across communication elements and teams for alignment behind the shared mission,
• Key is storytelling, music, and logical consistency

Mission: Defining Impact

• Align with business and marketing goals: Identify roles and impacts of marketing communications
• Understand audience (identify cognitive, affective, or behavior changes needed to address business issues/opportunities)
• Goals must be SMART, setting KPIs, and tracking measurement

The Strategic Framework

• Ensures marketing goals support business goals, aligned with the business’s purpose, vision, mission, value proposition, and strategy

Goal Alignment

• Clarify business & marketing goals and see where communications can have an impact
• Identify the specific job to be done in the short term
• Broad long-term objective
• Long-term key performance indicators

Audience Segmentation

• Breaking down target audience into subgroups with shared characteristics for better focus and personalization

Ways to Segment

• Focus and target your messaging more accurately
• Deliver a more personalized and relevant message in the most relevant media channel (right message, right place, right time)
• Best when combined

Segment Topics

• Geographic (location-based), Demographic (age, gender, etc)
• Psychographic (values, lifestyle)
• Behavioral (habits, purchasing styles)

Segment Accuracy Guide

• Measurable, substantial, accessible, stable, differentiable, and actionable
• Gathers data from multiple sources: emerging, digital, secondary, psychographic, behavioral, and quantitative data

Customer Insight

• Target segments are determined by selecting commercially attractive segments based on segment size, attractiveness, and business capability

Data Combination

• Combine the data from different sources to get a view of each segment

Segmentation Models

• Customer Personas (generalized representations) and Customer Journey Maps (visual representations) can show insights, blockages, gaps, and opportunities

Going Deeper Than Data

• Is about gathering relevant data, information, facts and insights to explain the audience
• Finds the correlation and connects the red threads
• Digs until all questions have been exhausted
• It’s a bridge between consumer behavior and strategic action, human truth, and revelation

Questions

• Why, So what, How does that make them feel, Is there anything wrong?
• Is your insight an understanding of the target audience?

How To Write An Insight

• Set the context, outline the issues and determine why the action or behavior is happening

Evaluating Your Insight

• Must new, rooted in behavior, identifies a motivation and simple

Content Creation

• Creation of resonant brand stories as a step in the 6M Framework for Developing IMC

STP Model

• Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning- to decide on the best customers to serve, and then create a clear position in the market to stand out from competitors

Brand Positioning

• Is how to stand out and get consumers to find and understand you, even though it’s external its also very internal.
• It ensures target customers find us by making it clear what we can provide and why we are
• Establishes a brand’s value proposition in a way that resonates and differentiates it from competitors
• A strategic process to clarify how what the customer needs will come from
• Memory-ability, differentiation, relevance

Effective Positioning Drives...

• Memory-ability, differentiation, relevance, and resonance
• Position for target audiences and have your value relate to that

Positioning Strategies

• Vertical around superiority, horizontal attributes, reverse stripping away expectations, gender, and breakaway and associating with a different category
• A brand positioning statement must contain clear clients, and what you can help for customer
• Brand’s value proposition into a compelling answer to the question - Why should I buy?

Brand Statement

• Know your competitor and consumer so you meet the needs that they can’t
• The Unique Selling Point (USP) should have a strong statement

4 Components of Compelling Value

• For whom, for when, what, why, and relative to whom
• Should be credible with realistic, believable claims

Value Communication

• Relevancy and resonating with clients deeply while staying realistic
• Distinctive, durable, and defendable

For Brand Sustainability

• See if the organization can realistically do these 5 things
• Is it faithful and what are the key messages?

Brand Repositioning

• Changing existing brand's position in the market to target a new or broader audience, respond to market changes, update the brand image, or counteract competitive pressures

Positioning

• Look at market conditions, pressures to increase profitability

Evaluating Success

• Through awareness surveys, market share
• STP Model and Effective Brand Positioning both summarize the slides

The Message

• It best helps if woven as a narrative because stories trigger release of oxytocin which in turn builds trust
• The mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative
• Tells compelling stories that can increase customer loyalty
• Narrative typically involves a series of events

The Story

• Contains characters, plots, set ups, and a focus
• Tells of Brand building which focus of connection and lasting long-term relationships
• Key role in Brand Building

The Narrative

• Has an understanding of both problems and solution which empowers and gives light and showcases testimonials
• Effective storytelling
• Know yourself and the audience/value you can bring
• Has a well crafted and insight

Case Study Approach

• Take the cluster themes to the end

Explore marketing communications, focusing on avoiding over-studied brands. Discover ways companies communicate brand stories to their target audience and qualities of great marketing communications. Also, examine various marketing communication channels.