Question

Write a paper (750-1,000 words) that analyzes the changes to IMC strategy a company faces in light of the digital upheaval led by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others. The paper should consider Porter’s five forces framework, including competitors, buyers, suppliers, potential entrants, and substitutes.

Answer 1

IMC as defined by many scholar and scholarly articles, could be narrowed down to mean the manner at which a firm, organization or any business enterprise communicates to its market, gets feedback from them and how they handle their information flow just all in the name of achieving a well-coordinated way of marketing their products or services to gain a greater market share. Due to much competitions threats, many business enterprises have had to change the way they carry out their integrated marketing communications. The competition coming from new entrants or even existing competitors, substitutes, and event suppliers.

Earlier enough, the carrying out the strategy of marketing, was just not so complicated or it needed not much of having a specific strategy, however, due to the changes and having greater forces that are changing the environment of business and in that case, the micro and macro factor, there has been the need to have a sort of strategy to be used in order to have a better strategy to survive in the field.

A lot of information is being presented in the online search engines such as Google. Makes any new entrant have a wide access to how to operate his or her own business in a certain industry. This posing as a threat to the already existing firms, they have to change how they carry out their integrated marketing communicating strategy. Some have gone out and appealing to their clients, the already existing and perhaps to gain the others, by giving them fair prices of products or services. This has been done by application of low-cost leadership strategy. The communication using just any channel available for product promotion, it has hindered the many entrants into the industry due to the fact that they can’t afford to offer the same quality as their competitors with such lower prices.

The emergence of digital communication, many firms have felt the need to change their strategy on how they would reach out to their consumers or even how they will increase their market share. Many of the consumers, have turned into the use of digital gadgets and have left the old way of receiving information like the use of televisions, read of newspapers and also reading handout brochures. Hence many firms in conjunction with the above channels of advertising, have resorted to use the digital way to communicate with their consumers and any potential clients. They have used websites that are frequently visited and key in pop up ads about their services or product that they are offering.

In this way too, firm to be on leading edge, and have a good reach out to their consumers, the internet has played a major role and also changing the way the business enterprises communicate to the buyers. The channel has enabled a speedy way of exchange of information of clients, who don’t even want to share out their real identity. Information that could also be used to better the production process. They have been even able to conduct a persuasion into a purchase of a product or service with very less being spent since the use of the internet is so cheap that even a firm can fail to realize how much it has spent on it. In this way, they have increased the market share since internet presents a wide market field.

All in concluding about the internet and technology, the IMC strategy has just gone from communicating to the consumers and any other potential consumers to a persuasive and the actual sale taking place on the online platform. They have done this to ensure the sales are at top and consumers can get their products at the comfort of their homes, hence what is called online shopping. Any competitor that is not using this new IMC strategy hence he has been knocked out of the business since most of the firms in the same industry are using this way to gain as many consumers as possible.

In general, any firm out there which wants to carry out a successful marketing needs to have an upgraded Integrated Marketing Communication strategy. It needs to have the potential campaign goals and any potential limitation and thus have a specific targeted audience. This makes it easier to understand what type of message they what to convey. Understanding their SWOT analysis and using it as applicable is what is making the entire difference. In addition to any firm getting creative, for sure it will gain the expected sales and perhaps service the stiff completion from competitors, substitutes, and new entrants.