IMC AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION - Essay Example

? IMC AND SATISFACTION ………………………….. College ……………………………… ……………….. Words count: 1031 Executive Summary As business contexts have been largely impacted by competition for last many years, all the firms put efforts to achieve competitive advantage. When it comes to the modern marketing aspects, advertising and promotion are the very common techniques that marketers use to communicate brand messages. In recent years, Integrated Marketing Communication, a newly emerging and young academic framework, has become a very strategic and magical bullet that is found to help a firm achieve sustainable competitive advantage. IMC is a careful coordination of varying promotional tools such as sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, event marketing, public relation with a view to facilitate effective brand communication along with ensuring of consistency in every message (Lamb, hair and McDaniel, 2008,p. 413). This paper discusses the advertising strategy of Milky Way and explains different promotional strategies, measuring of the effectiveness of advertising and marketing research approach. Milky Way’s advertising Strategy Milky Way bar, a chocolate bar distributed by Mars Incorporated Company headquartered in Mclean, USA, is one of the most admired and widely renowned chocolate brand name across the world. In 2012, the company launched an ad campaign labeled ‘Sorry, I was eating a Milky Way’ to attract targeted market to a feeling that the bar is particularly irresistible. The advertising strategy used in this ad campaign seems more or less to be affective advertising strategy. Literatures including Clow and Baack (2004, p. 231) and Shimp (2008, p. 225) identified the very basic advertising strategies, that are cognitive strategy, affective strategy and brand strategy. Affective advertising strategy elicits emotions, feelings and perceptions so as to affect the reasoning process of targeted audience which in turn lead them to take a proper action (Clow and Baack, 2004, p. 234). Milky Way’s adverting campaign in the print media labeled ‘Sorry I was eating a Milky Way’ is shown in the figure below. This advertising integrated both resonance and emotional advertising techniques. This advertising provides both resonant and emotional messages to customers that a bride is quite unlikely to be present on time when she was enjoying the gooey caramel tastes of the Milky Way. Arens, Weigold and Arens (2008, p. 340) noted that resonance in advertising refers to echoing, reverberating and vibrating. Milky Way’s advertising is meant to catch the imagination of audience. Emotional advertising tries to reflect emotions that motivate customers’ recall of product and choice. Emotions such as reliability, happiness, pleasure, passion etc are connected to Milky Way’s advertising message. Milky Way’s advertising is meant to attract customers attraction and to influence them to recall the brand name and thus to build brand image. Measuring the effectiveness of Advertising There are basically four outcomes of an advertising effort, they are; 1) recognition and recall, 2) emotional reaction, 3) persuasion and 4) sales responses. Shimp (2008, p. 289) has clearly outlined certain techniques that can help measuring the effectiveness of an advertising. To measure the recognition and recall of customers, Shimp (2008, p. 289) suggests Starch Readership Service, a testing service of a company named GfK Custom Research North America to measure the reader awareness of customers through magazines, Buzzone Research Company to research consumers’ recognition through TV and Day-after recall testing to test customers’ recall after one-day of the advertisement. To measure the emotional reactions, Shimp (2008, p. 289) suggests brain imaging of customers with help of neuroscience, self-reporting of customers and physiological tests to measure any of several autonomous reactions of customers to advertising. To measure the persuasion effect of advertising, he suggests ARS persuasion method in which the company will test individual selling propositions and completed television commercials. To measure sales response of customers, he suggests data collection and research conducted by Information Research Inc. Promotional strategies There are basically two promotions. They are trade promotion and consumer promotion. Trade promotions are incentives, contests, vendor support program, fees and discounts. Consumer promotions are oriented to promote consumers’ purchases. They include coupons, contests, refunds, premiums, rebates and free sample (Clow and Baack, 2004, p. 11). From the perspective of Integrated Marketing Communications, many literatures have often considered personal selling, public relation, word-of-mouth, event marketing as some of the most strategic aspects to promoting sales. Marketing Research Approach Marketers widely use different methods, strategies and approaches to marketing research. Customer satisfaction is one of the main aims and objectives all the business today express throughout their brand messages, mission and vision statements and company prospects. But, it is often a difficult task to identify and measure the level of customer satisfaction. The best approach to measuring customer satisfaction is to measure brand image and customer loyalty. Shaw and Reed (1999, p. 78) noted that customers’ experience leads to satisfaction and that thence to loyalty. The best approach to measuring customer satisfaction is to perceive the same as the outcome of brand image and brand loyalty and evaluate how effectively the company maintains customer relationship and the company benefits brand image as well as brand loyalty. Customer satisfaction depends on their experiences about the utility, value and quality aspects of the products or services according to their expectations. Gap between customer expectation and experience Gap between customer expectation and customer experience is the major determinant of customer satisfaction. Customer expects certain values, utilities, qualities and benefits from a product and services. When they buy and consume the goods or services, they experience these values or utilities in different level. If their expectation exceeds the experience, they are most likely to be unsatisfied. If their experience exceeds their expectation of the values and benefits, they are very likely to be satisfied. Whenever a goods or service is able to meet the expectation of customers, it is most likely that customer satisfaction begins and if the experience is better, the level of satisfaction too increases. Hence, the gap between customer experience and expectation is the main determinant in measuring the satisfaction. Conclusion This paper has briefly analyzed Milky Way’s recent advertising campaign labeled ‘Sorry I was eating Milky Way’. This paper presented the conceptual frameworks related to affective advertising, promotional strategies, measuring the effectiveness of advertising and marketing research approach to determining the gap between experience and expectation of customers about a goods or service. References Arens, W.F, Weigold, M.F and Arens, C, 2008, Contemporary Advertising, Eleventh edition, McGraw Hill Companies Clow K.E and Baack D, 2004, Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications, Prentice-Hall, Perason Education Inc Lamb, C.W, Hair, J.F and McDaniel, J.C. 2008, Essentials of Marketing, Sixth and illustrated edition, Cengage Learning Shimp, T. A, 2008, Advertising Promotion, and Other Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communications, Illustrated eighth edition, Cengage Learning Shaw, R and Reed, D, 1999, Measuring and Valuing Customer Relationships: How to Develop the Measures That Drive Profitable CRM Strategies, Business Intelligence Read More