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| The key to building brand equity in the twenty-first century is to develop interdependent, mutually satisfying relationships with customers and other stakeholders. To manage these relationships, companies will need to consciously integrate their marketing communications activities with all their other company functions so that all the messages the marketplace receives about the company are consistent. The idea is to not just meet customer expectations but to exceed them. As part of this process, it is important for advertising people to understand how to integrate the various tools of marketing communications. Advertising practitioners need to have a basic understanding of what other tools are available to them and how they can best be used in the overall communications mix. In direct marketing, the marketer builds and maintains a database of customers and prospects and uses anything from personal contact to mass media to communicate with them directly in the effort to generate a response, a transaction, or a visit to a retail location. The database is the key to direct marketing success, especially in an IMC program. Databases let marketers target, segment, and grade customers. This allows them to identify their best customers, their value to the organization, and their needs and buying behavior. They can then calculate the customer's lifetime value. The database is the corporate memory of all important customer information. It should record every transaction across all points of contact with both channel members and customers. The database also enables the company to measure the efficiency of its direct-response advertising efforts. Working with a marketing database requires two processes: data management and data access. Advertisers and agencies now realize they can't do the job with one medium. Databases let companies choose the prospects they can serve most effectively and profitably. By providing a tangible response, direct marketing offers accountability. Direct marketing offers convenience to time-sensitive consumers and precision and flexibility to cost-sensitive marketers. Direct marketing is a rapidly growing industry, but it still suffers from problems of cost, clutter, and image. Direct marketers use a variety of activities, from direct sales (personal selling and telemarketing) to direct-response advertising. Telemarketing, followed by direct mail, is the medium of choice for most direct marketers, but more are beginning to use other media, especially TV infomercials. Interactive TV may be the direct-marketing medium of the future. Personal selling is actually the ultimate interactive medium. It is the interpersonal communication process by which a seller ascertains and then satisfies the needs of a buyer, to the mutual, long-term benefit of both parties. There are many types of personal selling: retail, business-to business, and direct selling. Since advertising is a support service for a company's sales efforts, advertising people have to understand the selling environment their companies deal in. The greatest strength of personal selling is its personal nature. Nothing is as persuasive as personal communication. The one-to one situation facilitates instant feedback. And the rep has the flexibility to adjust the presentation, tailoring it specifically to the needs and interests of the particular prospect. Like all communications tools, personal selling also has some drawbacks. It is very labor intensive and therefore very expensive. One important role of advertising is to reduce the cost of sales by communicating as much relevant information as possible about the company and its products before the salesperson even calls. The salesperson has incredible power to either make or break a delicate relationship. So one of the risks is that one bad apple can ruin a previously unblemished association. Salespeople provide four communications functions: information gathering, information providing, order fulfillment, and relationship building. Sales promotion complements advertising and personal selling by stimulating sales. It includes direct inducements (such as money, prizes, or gifts) aimed at salespeople, distributors, retailers, consumers, and industrial buyers. Marketers must balance sales promotion with advertising. Advertising creates market value for a brand; promotion creates market volume. Advertising has a positive effect on profits; promotion can have a negative effect. Sales promotion techniques are used in the trade to push products through the distribution channels and with consumers to pull them through. Manufacturers use many sales promotion techniques with dealers: slotting allowances, trade deals, display allowances, buyback allowances, advertising allowances, co-op advertising and advertising materials, dealer premiums and contests, push money, and company conventions and dealer meetings. Sales promotions aimed at the ultimate purchaser include point-of-purchase materials, coupons, electronic coupons and convenience cards, cents-off promotions, refunds, rebates, premiums, sampling, combination offers, contests, and sweepstakes. |