and supply chain management, we're going to move now

to the integrated marketing communications aspect of

creating value for the marketplace. keep in mind what we've been talking about

is the fact that an

organization or business puts together

a marketing mix - your product, price, place

(or we refer to it as supply chain management), and promotion

(we refer to it as integrated marketing communication)

so you put together a marketing mix that the customer

will perceive as valuable in exchange

for the price you set for your product. and what your job is to do

as a marketer is to do that to facilitate

that exchange, now

let's say that you have a great product

at a great price, and people know about it

but you haven't handled the logistics

very well anyhow and you have a stockout. in that case you can

only sell as much of a product as you have available to sell,

and you re limited by the weakest elemnt

of the marketing mix - at this point supply chain management, take another example

let's say you have a great product

available at a fair price for the perceived

value. it's available when and where people want it,

but guess what - they don't know about it because you've not had any

integrated marketing communication. in that case

you're only as strong in the marketplace as the weakest

element of the marketing mix. you can sell as much of

the product as people are aware of the product that you have available

for sale. so, we're going to focus now a little bit

on this last aspect of market value creation called

promotion or integrated marketing communication.

what do we mean by

integrated marketing communication? well basically what we're going to do

is to select and use

different marketing communications tools

whether that be advertising, public relations

sales promotion, personal selling,

social media to create

one consistent message across

multiple channels so whether you're using

television, or print, or electronic

or face to face, whatever channel it is that you're using

you want your message to be consistent so people have a strong position

recognition with your product. you don't want to confuse them about

what your key points of differentiation

are. so, this will help to ensure maximum

impact on your current customers

and also potential customers based

on what you're hoping to achieve through your communication objectives.

I mean, are you wanting people to change their

attitude about your brand; are you wanting people to

you know just simply recognize the name of your brand

what is your communication objective.

so, very simply out, we want to make sure

is that all communication from the marketing organization

presents a consistent, valuable message

to the target market. and we call that IMC

or integrated marketing communications.

let's back up a little bit

and recognize that communication is communication

whether it be marketing communication or in

any particular mode. so, basically, what happens

in communication is you have sender who has the ideas,

and in this case, the sender would be the

marketer or the marketing department within the organization.

Through market sensing, they understand the consumer, consumer behavior,

how people go about buying, and using products, they understand the marketing environment,

they've also interpreted the market and so they know how we should be

positioning or differentiating

our product in the marketplace. they know

the characteristics of the customer that we're trying to reach

that customer being on the other end

as the receiver of the communication

message. okay so back to the sender we have all this

background information which then we

generally communicate to someone

within the marketing organization

that will encode a message,

okay; so maybe the message

is instead of telling all about your hamburgers

and what goes on them, you want to focus on the amount

meat in the hamburgers that you're selling. so your whole campaign

might be based upon where's the beef

or something like that. so, basically, what happens is generally

the promotion or creative people of an advertising message will take

all what you know about your business in the marketplace

and encode that into a message

that they will then send or transmit

via various

mediums; whether that be

you know print or electronic advertising mediums;

it might be through public relations or personal selling.

in any event, they translate that to the recipient

who then translates their meaning;

what that means to them. and, hopefully

in this communication process, there's some

feedback - one form of feedback would be

if the receiver goes and purchases the sender's product

but feedback is generally a little bit slower than that

and we'll l find that feedback and personal selling

when you're sitting there one-on-one with someone is much more rapid than

feedback in advertising.

so that's something to consider as well.

something that's not noted on this communication model

in that the receiver has a certain set of

experiences they've gone through in their life

and the marketer has a certain set of experiences

that they encode with their product.

hopefully in the middle, there some overlap between

the experiences of that product and the experiences that receiver.

and that's where marketing communication

is the most beneficial. also sometimes there's noise that

interferes with this process zipping and zapping and dvring of

television commercials - you know

fog or poor weather conditions or traffic

interferes with outdoor campaigns

that are trying to communicate to potential customers.

but, all in all the communication process

that applies to other forms of communication

applies to marketing communication as well.