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3 Marketing Communications
Norman A, Hart
Considerable confusion exists concerning the roles of public relations and advertising in relation to the marketing function. This stems largely from the ambiguity of the term 'public relations', which has two distinct interpretations, one conceptual and the other practical. The former is well stated in the definition given by the Institute of Public Relations:
Public Relations practice is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.
Clearly, the achievement of such a broad objective implies the sending and receiving of messages along the most appropriate channels of communication to reach the many diverse publics upon which the success of an organisation depends. And the publics include customers and prospects just as much as employees and shareholders, while the channels of communication include advertising and direct mail just as much as editorial publicity and sponsorship .
. . In, spite of the very clear definition given above, practitioners and top management alike continue to interpret PR in its practical application as being little more than press relations leading to editorial publicity. What is overlooked is that advertising and editorial publicity are both 'media', and are as relevant to the achievement of marketing objectives as they are to the achievement of public relations objectives. Advertising, then. is a subset of public relations, and not a competitor. It carries messages that may relate to financial matters, personnel, purchasing, or indeed marketing. The same can be said of editorial publicity.
The purpose of this chapter is to identify and discuss briefly all the various message sources and channels that are likely to impinge upon the minds of customers and others who might have a role to play in the purchasing-selling interface. For convenience, these are all brought together under the term 'marketing communications'. Here, alas, there are a number of definitions giving alternative interpretations, from a narrow perspective to a broad one.
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f~ The generally held view is that marketing communications is simply the non 'face-to-face promotional activities of advertising, publicity, direct mail, exhibiUions, and sales promotion. While in practice this is exactly right, for the pur..Ii2~es of this chapter it is necessary to move a little further into the ultimate objective, and here another definition helps: 'Marketing communications are
. normally across-the-board communications ... to help move a potential customer from a state of ignorance towards a position of decision and action.
In other words, a prospective customer goes through a series of stages of acceptance in the process of adopting a new product, and it is the purpose of marketing communications to facilitate and accelerate tharsmovernent, This procedure is referred to as the 'adoption process' and can be broken
. down into five stages.
I. Awareness: the individual becomes cognizant of the innovation but lacks information about it.
. 2. Interest: the individual is stimulated to seek information about the innovation .
. 3. Evaluation: the individual considers whether it would make sense to try the innovation.
4. Trial: the individual tries the innovation on a small scale to improve his or her estimation of its utility.
5. Adoption: the individual decides to make full and regular use of the
innovation.
Clearly, marketing communications encompasses any form of communication that contributes to the conversion of a non-customer to a
. customer, and su"bs~q~enily to the retention of such custom:--~--" -'-'~-- "-~ ","c.
A model that has stood the test of time can be seen in Fig. 3.1. Here are not only the stages of the adoption process, but also the positive and negative factors which will accelerate or decelerate the rate at which the process will take place. It should be noted that the sales force is not usually considered to be part of marketing communications.
MESSAGE CUES
Within the marketing mix, provision for marketing communications may seem to reside in the fourth of the '4 Ps':
I. Product
2. Price
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3. Place
4. Promotion
This, however, is now regarded as inadequate, since by compartmentalizing 'promotion' a number of other important opportunities can be missed. One authority makes this point:
The promotional mix has long been viewed as the company's sole communications link with the consumer. However, this kind of provincialism can often lead to suboptimisation of the firm's total communications effort. Because if viewed in isolation, promotion can actually work against other elements in the marketing communications mix. Other communications elements with which promotion must be co-ordinated are price, product, retail outlets, and all other company actions which consumers might perceive as communicating something about the company's total product offering.
Before examining the role of promotion as such we should look at the message cues that might be transmitted by the other 3 P's - product, price and place.
Product
The fundamental marketing concept postulates that a customer does not buy a product but rather a produce performance, or more to the point, a satisfaction. In the consumer field it has been said that a customer does not buy soap, but rather hope: sirnifarly, in industrial marketing the customer buys holes rather than drills. Furthermore, the customer bases purchasing decisions upon the perceived benefits that will be received as against the actual physical product attributes.
The total product offering is not what the supplier offers, but what the customer sees to be on offer. It may well be that packaging and presentation constitute the key factor in a purchasing decision, particularly with the increasing number of undifferentiated products. Indeed, with some of these - for instance, cigarettes, cosmetics, and drinks - it could be argued that the package is the product. Increasingly, what comes inside the pack is identical as between one brand and another, and that where that is so, the package is the single most important purchasing influence. With products that sell in supermarkets, this is particularly important.
An interesting example of packaging and presentation concerns a range of divan beds where the mattresses were finished in a variety of fabrics