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A primary purpose of Marketing Communication is information dissemination.
Marketers must let potential buyers know
what products and services they have for sale at what price.
They also must provide information about
the products and the services to help buyers make a purchase decision.
In this function, marketing communication activities add
value to a business by reaching potential customers in the marketing.
A second core function of marketing communication is persuasion.
With persuasion, marketing professionals can create
new or stimulate existing desire to purchase a product among the consumers.
Effective persuaders can also lure buyers away from other sellers in the market.
A third and perhaps the most powerful function of marketing communication is branding.
A brand differentiates one seller's products from another with a set of unique words,
images, symbols, or a combination of them;
and through a process of cognitive association,
marketers can instill abstract values such as quality,
reliability, luxury, or fun into a company's brand.
And when consumers see a brand,
they would also think about these values.
As such, they will be willing to pay a premium for the product.
A successful brand adds tremendous market value to a product.
For example, according to a recent report by the Fortune Magazine,
Google became the world's most valuable brand in 2017 with
an estimated monetary value of 109.5 billion dollars,
followed by Apple brand at 107.1 billion dollars.
Successful marketing communication can bring great values to the firm,
but there are several challenges.
To effectively reach consumers,
marketers must first identify and find the right communication target.
Based on the communication target,
marketers must create the most compelling message
and then deliver the message in the right channel at the right moment.
So when considering the target of marketing communication we must
differentiate the consumers from the audience.
Consumers are those people who might be interested in your firm's products or services,
whereas the audience is the people whom you may reach via the communication channels.
Marketers need to consider
the unique characteristics of the consumers related to the product interest.
They must also understand
their media use habits in order to understand these same people,
but as media audience.
After identifying the communication target,
the next important step in marketing communication will be to create the right message.
For marketing communication to succeed,
the message must be interesting enough to capture the audience's attention and interest.
An effective marketing message must also be persuasive and strategic.
The next challenge in marketing communication is to find
the right moment to deliver the right message to the right target.
Is your communication target paying attention?
How do you know if they're paying attention?
To address these critical questions,
we must develop a reliable feedback system.
For example, advertisers rely heavily on media user data,
such as the ratings of TV shows and the number of
newspaper or magazine subscriptions to project audience behavior.
While audience data may provide
important insights about what media content people are paying attention,
they cannot tell us whether or not a consumer is considering to make a purchase.
As such, we must also rely on
other intelligence and data sources to capture
the best moment for delivering the right marketing messages.
The internet and digital technologies offer
unprecedented audience and consumer intelligence through big data and analytics;
and we will explore such a data driven marketing strategies in later lessons.
But first, let's see a short video from Google for a preview.
Finally, one biggest challenge to
effective marketing communication is selecting the right channel to deliver the message.
Not that long ago, marketers only need to
manage a dozen or so dominant marketing channels,
include direct to consumer, print media,
electronic and broadcast media,
and out of home displays.
However, just in the last two decades,
human society saw the explosion of
new media technologies that had led to the creation of millions,
if not billions, of new communication channels.
Every YouTube video, every Facebook page, every website,
and every mobile apps are now potential vehicles for carrying marketing information.
How do marketers make sense and manage
marketing communication in this ever changing media landscape?
Mike YaoAssociate Professor of Digital Media
