Marketing Communications Briefing Document PDF

Top of Form **Briefing Document: Marketing Communications** **Introduction:** This document summarizes key concepts and theories in marketing communications based on the provided excerpts. The focus is on understanding how marketing messages are created, delivered, and received, and how these pro...

Top of Form **Briefing Document: Marketing Communications** **Introduction:** This document summarizes key concepts and theories in marketing communications based on the provided excerpts. The focus is on understanding how marketing messages are created, delivered, and received, and how these processes influence consumer behavior and brand relationships. We\'ll examine different types of exchanges, the importance of engagement, factors influencing message effectiveness, consumer decision-making processes, and various interpretations of how marketing communications work. **I. Key Concepts in Marketing Communications** - **Exchange:** The fundamental concept in marketing is exchange, where two or more parties offer something of value. - **Transactional Exchanges:** Short-term, one-off exchanges primarily motivated by self-interest, such as buying a meal from a burger van. - *\"Transactional (or market) exchanges\...occur independently of any previous or subsequent exchanges. They have a short-term orientation and are primarily motivated by self-interest.\"* - **Relational/Collaborative Exchanges:** Long-term oriented exchanges built on building and maintaining supportive relationships, such as regularly buying from the same burger van. - *\"Collaborative exchanges have a longer-term orientation and develop between parties who wish to build and maintain long-term supportive relationships\"* - **Engagement:** Successful communication involves conveying understanding and meaning, not just accumulating impressions or clicks. \"Engaged time\" is emerging as a key metric, measuring the amount of time an individual spends with content. - *\"Successful engagement indicates that understanding and meaning have been conveyed effectively, that the communications have value.\"* - *\"The primary role of marketing communications is to engage audiences.\"* - **Multimedia Integration:** Incorporating multimedia technologies into the customer experience can enhance engagement across all channels (e.g., Victoria\'s Secret in-store experiences). - **Internal Communications:** Good communication with internal stakeholders (e.g., employees) is crucial for establishing favorable brand perceptions. Employee-focused campaigns can project internal brand values. - *\"It should be recognised that good communi-cations with internal stakeholders, such as employees, are also vital if, in the long term, favourable images, perceptions and attitudes are to be established successfully.\"* - **Environmental Influences:** Marketing communications are shaped by external and internal factors such as: - **External:** Political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental forces. Social forces, for example, including values and beliefs, can greatly impact marketing campaigns (e.g., McDonald\'s health initiatives due to social pressure). - **Internal:** Company culture, resources, strategies, and the use of tools, media, and messages. - **Communication Goals:** Marketing communication objectives may include: - **Market penetration:** Focus on informing and creating awareness to acquire new customers using advertising and public relations. - **Customer retention:** Focus on rewarding current customers using loyalty programs. - **Intermediate goals:** Creating awareness, consideration, or preference with a specific communications mix. **II. The Communication Process and Message Effectiveness** - **Decoding:** The process of interpreting a message is influenced by the receiver's realm of understanding, including their experiences, perceptions, attitudes, and values. The more a receiver understands about the source, the better they are able to accurately decode the intended message. - *\"Decoding is the process of transforming and interpreting a message into thought. This process is influenced by the receiver's realm of understanding\...\"* - **Types of Communication:\'To\' Communication:** Planned, persuasive messages aimed at brand awareness and loyalty (e.g., highlighting USPs and ESPs). - **\'For\' Communication:** Planned persuasive messages with augmented offerings for target markets (e.g., product lifecycle, guarantees, loyalty programs). - **\'With\' Communication:** Integrated mix of planned and interactive communication designed to share knowledge. - **Word-of-Mouth (WoM) Marketing:** WoM can be shaped by product discussion, self-involvement (status and dissonance reduction), other involvement (helping others), and message involvement. Trust in WoM comes from its perceived authenticity (from \"people just like them\"). \* *\"Mazzarol et al. (2007) identify the 'richness of the message' and the 'strength of the implied or explicit advocacy' as important triggers for WoM. Palmer (2009) brings these together and refers to WoM as information people can trust as it comes from people just like them and it helps them make better decisions.\"* - **Influencers & Opinion Formers:** Experts in a specific area can be leveraged to build credibility for products, as in the case of ethical drug manufacturers using doctors for new product launches. - **Celebrity Endorsement:** Works through \"meaning transfer,\" where consumers evaluate celebrities based on their perceived image and attributes (McCracken, 1989). **III. Consumer Decision-Making Processes** - **The Customer Journey:** The purchase process is a journey encompassing problem awareness, search for solutions, decision-making, post-purchase experience and reflection. It was once conceptualized as a linear format, like a funnel, but is now understood as circular. - **Circular Decision Journey:** This involves an initial consideration set, active research and evaluation, a moment of purchase, and a post-purchase loyalty loop. Customer satisfaction is built on cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and channels. - **Attention:** Attracting attention is a key factor in communication effectiveness. Both external (stimulus size, position, novelty, contrast) and internal factors (expectations, needs, motives) affect attention. Messages that conflict with expectations may receive more attention. Stimuli should link to brand values to avoid the message getting lost. - *\"Attention occurs when the stimulus activates one or more sensory receptor nerves and the resulting sensations go to the brain for processing\"* - **Gestalt Psychology:** Individuals organize stimuli to simplify meaning by looking for patterns and a sense of a larger whole. - **Perceptual Interpretation:** Individuals assign meaning to stimuli based on their experiences, expectations, and motives, leading to subjective interpretations. Distortions in perception can result from stereotyping and the halo effect. - **Memory:** Information is first processed in sensory storage, then moved to short-term memory before transfer to long-term memory where it is constantly reorganized. - **Attitudes:** Attitudes are developed based on the beliefs about a product\'s attributes, which influence consumer decision-making. - **Problem Solving:Extended Problem Solving (EPS):** High-involvement purchases where buyers carefully consider options based on information. - **Limited Problem Solving (LPS):** Experience with the product reduces the need for extensive external search. - **Routinized Response Behavior (RRB):** Habitual purchases requiring minimal information search. - **Organisational Buying:** The decision-making process in organizational purchases has phases similar to consumer processes but also unique dynamics. - **Buyclasses:** New task, modified rebuy, and straight rebuy. - **Buying Center (DMU):** A group of people involved in the purchase decision, including users, influencers, deciders, and buyers. - **Relationship Dynamics:** The nature of relationships between organizations (e.g., relational vs. market) influences purchase decisions. - **Perceived Risk:** The uncertainty associated with purchase decisions. Risk includes performance, financial, physical, social, ego, and time factors. **IV. Consumer Behavior & Decision-Making Theories** - **Involvement Theory:** The level of risk and personal relevance perceived by a consumer when making a purchase decision determines whether there is high or low involvement. - **Hedonic Consumption:** Focuses on the multisensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects of consumer experiences. Historical and fantasy imagery can evoke emotional responses. - **Tribal Consumption:** Consumption driven by a sense of community and shared experiences. Products serve a \"linking value\" within a tribal network. - *\"The term 'tribe' refers to communities characterised by people who share emo-tions, experiences, lifestyles and patterns of consumption.\"* - **e-Tribes:** Online communities characterized by the eight \"E\"s: experience, environment, engagement, empathy, empowerment, exclusivity, emergence, and entanglement. - **Behavioral Economics:** Recognizes that decisions are not always rational but influenced by emotions, biases, and heuristics. Loss aversion and framing techniques can be used in marketing communication. - *\"So, purchase decisions are not made deliberatively and consciously by evaluating all permutations and outcomes. Decisions are made around choices that are based on comparison, rather than absolutely.\"* - **Dacia Case Study:** This example illustrates how an \"intellectual alibi\" can shift perceptions. Dacia marketed itself as a smart choice for savvy consumers, counteracting negative perceptions of low-priced cars in the UK. **V. How Marketing Communications Works: Interpretations** - **AIDA Model:** (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) A sequential model representing the stages a salesperson or persuasive communication should take a prospect through. - **Hierarchy of Effects Models:** Progressive stages, such as awareness to purchase, that a customer moves through. Advertising does not bring immediate behavioral changes but rather mental ones. - **Information Processing Model:** Views consumers as active information processors and problem-solvers. The focus is on cognition, yield, and behavior. - **Acquisition, Development & Retention:** This highlights the different communication needs of customers at different points in the relationship: - **Acquisition:** Focus is on search, initiation, and familiarization. - **Development:** Reducing risk, building credibility, encouraging cross-selling. - **Retention:** The most profitable, built on trust, commitment and cross buying. - **Value-Orientated Exchanges:** Relationships range from short-term, price-oriented exchanges to long-term, value-driven relationships. The focus changes from initial attraction to mutual needs satisfaction. - **Content Significance:** Content should be new, interesting, and personally significant to be valuable. - **Cognitive Processing:** Examines how people process information, transforming it into meanings and judgments. This includes the measurement of support and counter arguments, source and message execution thoughts. **VI. Key Takeaways** - Marketing communication is not just about delivering messages, it\'s about creating value and building relationships. - Understanding the target audience, their motivations, and decision-making processes is crucial. - Effective communication involves engagement, not just exposure. - Consumers are not always rational and are influenced by a range of psychological and social factors. - Marketing communications must adapt to the ever-changing environment and utilize diverse tools and techniques to engage and persuade audiences. - There are various models that explain how marketing communications might work, but none are a \'one size fits all\'. Marketing communications works in different ways in different contexts. **Conclusion:** This document highlights the complex nature of marketing communications. By understanding these concepts, professionals can create more effective campaigns that resonate with their target audiences and drive business results. **Chapter 1 Key points** **Chapter 1** **Introducing marketing Communications** There are two broad types of exchange and they can be considered to sit at either end of a spectrum of exchange transactions. At one end are transactional or market exchanges, which are characterized as one-off exchanges in which price and product are central elements. At the other end are relational or collaborative exchanges where there has been a stream of transactions and the relationship is the central element. Relationships become stronger as the frequency of exchanges increases. As exchanges become more frequent, the intensity of the relationship strengthens so that the focus is no longer on the product or price within the exchange but on the relationship itself. The scope of marketing communications embraces an audience-centred perspective of planned, unplanned, product and service experiences. The role of marketing communications is to engage audiences with a view to provoking relevant conversations. The tasks of marketing communications are based within a need to differentiate, reinforce, inform or persuade audiences to think and behave in particular ways. Engagement is a function of two elements. The first is the degree to which a message encourages thinking and feeling about a brand: the development of brand values. The second is about the degree to which a message stimulates behaviour or action. Engagement may last a second, a minute, an hour, a day or even longer. Definitions have evolved as communications have developed. Here marketing communications is defined as: a process through which organisations and audiences engage with one another. Through an understanding of an audience's preferred communications environments, participants seek to develop, and present messages, before evaluating and acting upon any replies. By conveying messages that are relevant and significant, participants are encouraged to offer attitudinal, emotional and behavioural responses. **PART 1** IntroductIon to MarketIng coMMunIcatIons The internal, market and external environments all influence the use of marketing communications. The internal environment refers to employees, the culture, the financial resources and the marketing skills available to organisations. The market environment refers principally to the actions of competitors and the perceptions and attitudes held by customers towards an organisation or its brands. The external environment can be considered in terms of the PEST framework. The influence of any one of these elements on marketing communications can be significant, although the impact is usually generic and affects all organisations rather than any single brand or organisation. The marketing communications mix consists of various tools, media and messages that are used to reach, engage and provoke audience-centred conversations. The five tools, three categories of media and four types of message can be configured in different ways to meet the needs of target audiences. The way in which the marketing communications mix is configured for consumer markets is very different from the mix used for business markets. The tools, media and messages used are all different as the general contexts in which they operate require different approaches. Business markets favour personal selling: consumer markets, advertising. Both make increasing use of interactive media, and while rational messages are predominant in business markets, emotion-based messages tend to prevail in consumer markets. Bottom of Form **Chapter 2 Key points** **Communications: forms and** **Conversations** The linear or one-way communications process suggests that messages are developed by a source, encoded, transmitted, decoded and meaning applied to the message by a receiver. Noise in the system may prevent the true meaning of the messages from being conveyed, while feedback to the source is limited. The effectiveness of this communications process is determined by the strengths of the linkages between the different components. There are two particular influences on the communications process that need to be considered. First, the media used to convey information have fragmented drastically as a raft of new media have emerged. Second, people influence the communications process considerably, either as opinion leaders or formers or as participants in the word-of-mouth process. The influencer model depicts information flowing via media channels to particular types of people (opinion leaders and opinion formers; see p. 54) to whom other members of the audience refer for information and guidance. Through interpersonal networks, opinion leaders not only reach members of the target audience who may not have been exposed to the message, but may reinforce the impact of the message for those members who did receive the message. Increasingly communications are characterised by attributing meaning to messages that are shared, updated and a response to other messages. These 'conversations' can be termed 'interactional' and are an integral part of society. The interactional model of communications attempts to assimilate the variety of influences acting upon the communications process and account for the responses (interactions) people give to messages received from people and machines. Opinion leaders are members of a peer group who have informal expertise and knowledge about a specific topic. Opinion formers have formal expertise bestowed upon them by virtue of their qualifications, experience and careers. Opinion followers value and use information from these sources in their decision-making processes. Marketing communications should, therefore, target leaders and formers as they can speed the overall communications process. Word-of-mouth (WoM) communications are 'interpersonal communications regarding products or services where the receiver regards the communicator as impartial'. WoM is an increasingly important form of effective communications. It is relatively cost-free yet very credible, and embodies the increasingly conversational nature of marketing communications. The process of adoption in aggregate form, over time, is diffusion. It is a group process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over a period of time among the members of a social system. Five particular groups, each with distinct characteristics, can be identified. **Chapter 3 Key points** **Audience insight: information** **processing and behavior** Awareness of the existence and availability of a product/service or an organisation is necessary before information can be processed and purchase behaviour expected. Much of marketing communications activity is directed towards getting the attention of the target audience. Awareness needs to be created, developed, refined or sustained, according to the characteristics of the market and the particular context facing an organisation (or audience) at any one point in time. Perception is concerned with how individuals see and make sense of their environment. The way in which individuals perceive, organise and interpret stimuli is a reflection of their past experiences and the classifications used to understand the different situations each individual frames every day. Marketing communications is used to position brands using a variety of stimuli so that consumers understand and recognise them. There are three factors important to the behavourist approach to learning: association, reinforcement and motivation. Behaviour is learned through the conditioning experience of a stimulus and response. Cognitive learning considers learning to be a function of an individual's attempt to control their immediate environment. Cognitive learning is about processing information in order that problems can be resolved. Central to this process is memory. Information-handling processes can range from the simple to the complex. There are three main processes: iconic, modelling and reasoning. Attitudes are predispositions, shaped through experience, to respond in an anticipated way to an object or situation. Attitudes are learned through past experiences and serve as a link between thoughts and behaviour. Attitudes tend to be consistent within each individual: they are clustered and very often interrelated. Attitudes consist of three interrelated elements: the cognitive, affective and conative, otherwise referred to as learn, feel, do. Marketing communications can be used to influence the attitudes held by a target market. When developing campaigns, consideration needs to be given to the current and desired attitudes to be held by the target audience. The focus of communications activities can be on whether the audience requires information (learning), an emotional disposition (feeling) or whether the audience needs to be encouraged to behave in a particular way (doing). Classical theory suggests that there are five stages to the general process whereby buyers make purchase decisions and implement them. These are problem recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision and post-purchase evaluation. Organisations use marketing communications in different ways in order to influence these different stages. Buyers do not follow the general purchase decision sequence at all times and three types of problem-solving behaviour are experienced by consumers. These are extended problem solving, limited problem solving and routinised response. The procedure may vary depending upon the time available, levels of perceived risk and the degree of involvement a buyer has with the type of product. The organisational buying decision process consists of six main stages or buyphases. These are need/problem recognition, product specification, supplier and product search, the evaluation of proposals, supplier selection and evaluation. There are a wide variety of individuals involved in organisational purchase decisions. There are *users*, *influencers*, *deciders*, *buyers* and *gatekeepers.* All fulfil different functions, all have varying degrees of impact on purchase decisions and all require different marketing communications in order to influence their decision-making. Consumers and organisational buyers experience risk when making purchasing decisions. This risk is perceived and concerns the uncertainty of the proposed purchase and the outcomes that will result from a decision to purchase a product. Five types of perceived risk can be identified. These are ego, social, physical, financial and performance risks. Individuals and groups make purchasing decisions on behalf of organisations. Different types of risk can be experienced, relating to a range of organisational and contextual issues. Marketing communications has an important task to reduce risk for consumers and organisational buyers. Involvement is about the degree of personal relevance and risk perceived by individuals in a particular purchase situation. Individuals experience involvement with products or services to be purchased. The level of involvement may vary through time as each member of the target market becomes more (or less) familiar with the purchase and associated communications. At the point of decision-making, involvement is either high or low. Some products and services can evoke high levels of involvement based on the emotional impact that consumption provides the buyer. This is referred to as *hedonic* *consumption* and refers to behaviour that relates to the multi-sensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of an individual's experience with products. *Historical imagery* and *fantasy imagery* are two aspects of hedonic consumption. Tribes are loosely interconnected communities where bonding and linking represent key activities designed to retain tribal membership. Tribes serve to link people who share passions and interests and 'tribal consumption' refers to consumption of products and services, not for their utility value, or for the sense of individual identification. Their consumption is considered to be important for the 'linking value' they provide within a tribal network. Tribes proliferate on the Internet, thanks mainly to its power to aggregate communities who share similar interests. These e-tribes have the same characteristics as traditional communities: namely, shared rituals and traditions, a similar consciousness of kind, and an obligation, or sense of duty, to the community and to its individual members. Behavioural economics is grounded in the belief that people make irrational rather than rational decisions and the central platform is about actual behaviour, not attitudes or opinions. People choose according to what is available, not what they absolutely want. **Chapter 4 Key points** **How marketing communications** **might work** Marketing communications should be used to complement an organisation's marketing, business and corporate strategies. Such harmonisation serves to reinforce core messages, reflect the mission and provide a means of using resources efficiently yet at the same time to provide reinforcement for the whole business strategy. The primary role of marketing communications is to engage audiences by either driving a response to the message itself, or encouraging a response to the brand itself, referred to as a call-to-action. There are five main ways in which marketing communications can be considered to work. These are the sequential buying process, attitude change, shaping relationships, developing significant value, and cognitive processing. The sequential approach assumes that marketing communications needs to take consumers through the decision-making process in a series of logical steps. Attitude change has been regarded by many as the main way to influence audiences through marketing communications. Marketing communications can be used to focus one of the three elements of the attitudinal construct: that is, the cognitive, affective or conative component. Relationship marketing can be characterised by the frequency and intensity of the exchanges between buyers and sellers. As these exchanges become more frequent and more intense, so the strength of the relationship between a consumer and a brand improves. These customer relationships can be considered in terms of a series of relationship-- development phases: customer acquisition, development, retention and decline. Collectively these are referred to as the customer lifecycle. The duration and intensity of each relationship phase in the lifecycle vary. Marketing communications works by influencing customers according to the stage they have reached in the lifecycle. Marketing communications is used to trigger brand associations and experiences for people. Those messages that are remembered contain particular characteristics. These are that the product must be different or new, that the way the message is executed is different or interesting, and that the message proclaims something that is personally significant to the individual in their current context. The term 'significance' means that the message is meaningful, relevant, and is perceived to be suitably credible. This is based on the concept of ad likeability, which many researchers believe is the only meaningful indicator of ad effectiveness. The net effect of all these characteristics might be that any one message may be significantly valuable to an individual. The cognitive processing model assumes that people attend to and process information in a logical rational way. Three types of cognitive response and how these relate to attitudes and intentions have been determined. These are attitudes towards the product, attitudes towards the message and attitudes towards the ad and its execution. There is a substantial amount of research that indicates that marketing communications (advertising) which promotes a 'positive emotional response of liking an ad is positively related to subsequent brand related cognitions (knowledge), brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Marketing communications works because liking an ad is positively related to subsequent Brand related cognitions (knowledge), brand attitudes, and purchase intentions. Attitude towards thread concept applies equally well with interactive media, ecommerce (attitude towards theist), sales promotion and personal selling. Chapteter