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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
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 the 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 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 will 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.
Followed by Apple Brand at $107.1 billion.
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 an 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 of interest.
They must also understand their media use habits,
in order to understand the 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 are paying attention?
To address this 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 to,
on 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 explorer such data driven marketing strategies in later lessons.
But first, let's see a short video from Google for our preview.
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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 of sold 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 societies 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
