Consumers today are being bombarded with commercial messages from a wide array of sources that do not necessarily resonate with the targeted consumers. Thus, there’s a tendency for even the most effectively planned out communication strategies to get “lost” in the crowd.
What marketers don’t comprehend is that consumers don’t distinguish messages in the same manner that marketers do. In the customer psyche all messages from various media boil down to a single message about the company.
Thus, contradicting messages from these different sources will result in blurred brand perceptions that in turn will have a catastrophic impact on customer relationships.
The problem lies not in the communication strategy per se, but rather in the inability of companies to integrate their various communication channels. Thus, the need of the hour is an effective integrated communication strategy that recognises all existing and potential touch points that consumers will have with a brand.
These touch points range from traditional media like television and magazines to social and digital media platforms. It is the latter that is transforming and challenging the dynamics of communication. While television, magazines and newspapers still continue to remain an integral communication tool, their dominance is declining.
Instead marketers are moving towards platforms like social media, emails, blogs etc. that require less broadcasting and more narrowcasting. Such new media allow marketers to interact with consumers in a more engaging way that empowers customers to view only the media messages that they prefer.
Thus, the challenge is to incorporate both traditional and digital media in a manner that will enhance the brand experience for the customer. MTI Consulting has introduced a nine-step process that will help companies to adopt such an effective integrated marketing communications strategy.
In short, this process involves understanding the mindset of the consumer, segmenting the customer, laying out particular objectives that should be achieved by the integrated marketing campaign, brand positioning, recommendation of the optimal marcom mix strategy, developing a detailed marcom framework, campaign development design and testing, launch and introducing an impact tracking system suggested by MTI, that could be adopted by the company under consideration.
So do not get lost in the crowd, implement an effective integrated marketing communications strategy that will help you navigate through the crowd with ease!
Mr Cader is the chief
executive of MTI Consulting