COMMUNICATION MIX

COMMUNICATION MIX

Communications Mix are the means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers, directly or indirectly, about the products and brands they sell. What is Communication Mix: “Communication Mix” is aimed at not only creating awareness about the product/service but also at persuading the customer to use and experience it.

Communication Mix is also called as “Promotion Mix”. The Communications Mix is the specific mix of advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing a company uses to pursue its advertising and marketing objectives. Promotion involves disseminating information about a product, product line, brand, or company. It is one of the four key aspects of the marketing mix.

1. Advertising: Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.

2. Personal selling: Personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships. Communication processes in which sales associates help customers satisfy their needs through face-to-face exchanges of information. 

3. Public relations: Building good relationships with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good "corporate image", and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events. Public Relations (PR).

4. Direct marketing: Direct communications with carefully targeted individual consumers to obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships. Direct marketing is the use of consumer-direct channels to reach and deliver goods and services to customers without using market middlemen.

5. Sales promotion: Short-term benefits or incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.

6. Events: A promotional activity such as festival, sporting event, concert or other activity that draws the right people and gets your message across in the best way possible.

7. Sponsorship: Sponsorship is about providing money to an event, in turn the product or company is acknowledged for doing so. Sponsorship helps the company improve its image and public relations within the market.

8. Viral Marketing: Viral marketing occurs when consumers pass on or recommend product/company/website to others. This could be via email, or bulletin boards or word of mouth.

Viral marketing may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, text messages, email messages, or web pages. The most commonly utilized transmission vehicles for viral messages include: pass-along based, incentive based, trendy based, and undercover based. However, the creative nature of viral marketing enables an "endless amount of potential forms and vehicles the messages can utilize for transmission", including mobile devices.

The ultimate goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to create viral messages that appeal to individuals with high social networking potential (SNP) and that have a high probability of being presented and spread by these individuals and their competitors in their communications with others in a short period of time.

9. Merchandising: Merchandising refers to the methods, practices and operations conducted to promote and sustain certain categories of commercial activity. The term is understood to have different specific meanings depending on the context. Merchandise is sale goods at a store

10. Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Word of mouth, or viva voce, is the passing of information from person to person by oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one person tells others a story about a real event or something made up. Oral tradition is cultural material and traditions transmitted by word of mouth through successive generations. Storytelling and oral tradition are forms of word of mouth that play important roles in folklore and mythology. Another example of oral communication is oral history—the recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the personal experiences and opinions of the speaker.

Oral history preservation is the field that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials collected by word of mouth, whatever format they may be in.

In marketing, word-of-mouth communication (WOM) involves the passing of information between a non-commercial communicator (i.e. someone who is not rewarded) and a receiver concerning a brand, a product, or a service.

When WOM is mediated through electronic means, the resulting electronic word of mouth (eWoM) refers to any statement consumers share via the Internet (e.g., web sites, social networks, instant messages, news feeds) about a product, service, brand, or company.

If the sender of word-of-mouth communication is rewarded than this process is referred to as word-of-mouth marketing, which relies on the added credibility of person-to-person communication, a personal recommendation. Using WOM as an opposing force to commercially motivated word-of-mouth marketing has been coined Proconsumer WOM.

11. Interactive marketing: Interactive Marketing refers to the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation. Interactive marketing features the ability to address an individual and the ability to gather and remember the response of that individual” leading to “the ability to address the individual once more in a way that takes into account his or her unique response.

Interactive marketing is not synonymous with online marketing, although interactive marketing processes are facilitated by internet technology. The ability to remember what the customer has said is made easier when we can collect customer information online and we can communicate with our customer more easily using the speed of the internet. Amazon.com is an excellent example of the use of interactive marketing, as customers record their preferences and are shown book selections that match not only their preferences but recent purchases.

12. Mobile Marketing: Mobile marketing is marketing through wireless handheld devices, such as cellular telephones, and m-commerce or mobile commerce involves completing a transaction via the cell phone.

13. Telemarketing: Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call. Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing.

14. Brand identity: How a business wants a brand's name, communication style, logo and other visual elements to be perceived by consumers. The components of the brand are created by the business itself, making brand identity the way in which a business wants consumers to perceive its brands, not necessarily how it is actually perceived. Brand identity is different than brand image, which is what consumers actually think. It is constructed by the business itself. A negative gap between brand identity and brand image means a company is out of touch with market sentiment, which will make selling its products more difficult. The brand image held by consumers can reach a point at which a business or product has to rebrand itself or risk not bringing in sales.

15. Corporate identity: A corporate identity is the overall image of a corporation or firm or business in the minds of diverse publics, such as customers and investors and employees. It is a primary task of the corporate communications department to maintain and build this identity to accord with and facilitate the attainment of business objectives. It is usually visibly manifested by way of branding and the use of trademarks.

Corporate identity comes into being when there is a common ownership of an organizational philosophy that is manifest in a distinct corporate culture. At its most profound, the public feel that they have ownership of the philosophy. Corporate identity helps organizations to answer questions like “who are we?” and “where are we going?” Corporate identity also allows consumers to denote their sense of belonging with particular human aggregates or groups. In general, this amounts to a corporate title, logo (logotype and/or logogram) and supporting devices commonly assembled within a set of guidelines. These guidelines govern how the identity is applied and confirm approved colour palettes, typefaces, page layouts and other such.

16. Point-of-purchase advertising: Displays, signs, structures, and devices that are promotional, and are used to identify, advertise, or merchandise an outlet, service, or product and serve as an aid to retail selling. The key word here is promotional. Merely stocking a shelf with soap or cereal doesn't make for POP. Nor does a sign that says "Meat Department."

MAJOR TYPES OF POP

1. Signs

2. Shelf media, such as shelf-talkers and shelf strips, may be attached to existing fixtures, and they don't take up precious floor, wall, or counter space.

3. Windows Displays.

4. Instore Commercials.

5. Standees

17. In film advertising: In-film advertising, in its most effective form, is about a brand being a part of the cinema's content. Many global brands are now turning to this medium for the sheer impact that a movie can make on its audiences. A brand using the medium of cinema to promote its message. A number of marketers are now using movies to project the core values of their brands.

18. Transit advertising: Advertising that appears inside and outside on public transport vehicles, in waiting areas, and at stations and terminals. Transit is targeted at the millions of people who are exposed to commercial transportation facilities, including buses, taxis, commuter trains, elevators, trolleys, airplanes, and subways. The increased number of women in the work force, audience segmentation, and the rising cost of TV advertising.

19. Ambient Advertising: Ambient Advertising definition is: The placement of advertising in unusual and unexpected places (location) often with unconventional methods (execution) and being first or only ad execution to do so (temporal). Newness, creativity, novelty and timing are key themes in ambient advertising. This definition is deliberately narrow and attempts to exclude ‘mainstream’ advertising Implicit in this definition are that Ambient is a moveable and somewhat subjective term and will shift according to the advertising norms of the day.

 

Ref: Dr. H. Lakdawala's Media Planning & Buying notes