Question

The way in which firms advertise, promote and sell their products has changed dramatically in the last decade. Some of this change is due to the evolution of social media platforms, some is due to the ways in which consumers use broadcast media such as television (once the premier advertising platform) and yet other changes have been brought about by the gathering and application of volumes of data about each of us individually and the market segments to which we belong. Commonly known as Integrated Market Communication (IMC) the way in which firms promote their products has also been influenced by the sheer number of messages that reach their consumers. By some estimates, a consumer in the highly targeted Millennial segment may see as many as 3500 advertising messages a day. To cut through this clutter, advertisers are employing innovative concepts such as guerilla marketing and highly personalized messages based on our social media and e-marketing behaviors. The most successful firms are those that truly do employ a mix of these techniques, making the concept of “integrated” communications more relevant than ever.

Select a firm that you believe has an interesting and successful promotional strategy. Identify at least three methods of IMC that they employ to reach their target audience and convey their message. You will likely need to conduct some additional research on the methods to fully understand them. Your post should include what firm you have selected, which three methods of IMC you believe they use successfully, how they use them (be specific and provide examples) and what target segment they are targeting. Be sure you include what you believe to be their core message.

Answer 1

IMC is one of the important trending concept of today's marketing, which involves integration of different promotional tools. Initially companies were using communication tools in an isolated way but today new concept evolved where we create link between different communication tools and messages to get best result.

Tools of IMC

• Advertising
• Personal selling - Involves direct communication with targeted customers.
• Sales promotions
• Direct marketing
• Public relations - Involves building relationships not only with customers but also employees, suppliers, society, government etc.
• Sponsorship - Is considered as popular tool used by most of the companies.
• Social media marketing - It provides huge amount of traffic and involves communicating in social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc
• Mobile marketing - creation of communication with customers through sending messages or by call.
• Internet marketing - search engine marketing (SEM),e-mail marketing, banner ads on specific websites, personal websites etc

Here IMC involves combining 2 or more tools defending upon targeted market, product, area to be covered under communication etc. Each organisation build a specific IMC method.

PORSCHE AND IMC

Porsche is German automobile company owned by Volkswagen know for successful adoption of IMC techniques.

Tools incorporated by Porsche are Events, mobiles, social media, Influencers,Video and Radio.one of the best thing about Porsche is that it combined traditional as well as emerging tools in IMC.

1. It selects an iconic location to conduct events, then shares information about event through Influencers across the social media and on the other hand it sends message in mobile.
2. It do shares stories of customer experience in instagram, snapchat etc.
3. Live event streaming on radio and websites.

But one of the drawback of IMC is that it wants organisation to have a flexible structure then only it can be adopted in successful manner.