Marketing Communications

Question: 1. Where Information of Marketing Communication can be found?. 2. How marketing communications operates within organizations and agencies? 3.How target markets and audiences are recognized/established? 4.The role and responsibilities of the marketing communications employee 5.How marketing communications impacts on the wider community and society? 6.Industry changes within marketing communications, trends and technologies. 7.Why it is necessary to continually learn and seek knowledge on the marketing communications industry and apply this in your workplace? 8.The current issues of concern in the industry. Answer: 1. In simple words, marketing communications refers to the ways by which various brands and organizations engage customers and inform, remind them about their new products or their brands. There are many sources both online as well offline that can provide tremendous information about the customer preferences and thus can be instrumental in formulating corporate strategy around market communication. Earlier, organizations delivered different messages to customers on different channels. However, now with integrated marketing communications, organizations tends to focus on the delivery of same message to customer no matter what the distribution channel is so as to offer seamless experience to customers (Hollensen, 2015). 2. Marketing communication mix refers to the set of tools that are used in different degrees and combinations to recognize the target audience. Some of the common tools are Sales promotion, direct marketing, advertising, public relations and social media (huang, Sarigollu, 2014). 3. Once the segmentation is done the next thing is to establish the target market. The marketers must know the targeted customer. In other words, the marketer must know the people who would buy the product or service. Once the organizations and marketers are aware of the demographics of consumers, they must know the issue that they are trying to address. The next step for marketers would be to analyze the methods of information search used by the customers. It is also important that the organizations and marketers must know the benefits or values that they are delivering to customers. 4. One of the most important responsibilities of the marketing communications employees is to manage the perceptions of their brands and products among consumers in a positive manner by employing appropriate marketing communication mix. People managing marketing communications must ensure that there should be uniform message communicated to customers across different channels and the message should be crisp and clear so that they can identify themselves with the brand. As they manage the reputation of the brand, it is very important that they should always be updated with the latest industry trends. They should also ensure that marketing message that organization is intended to communicate is aligned with the corporate strategy and also if there is any noise or unwanted image or negative perception of the brand in the marker, they should strive to convert it into positive image by establishing credibility of the brand or by reclaiming it. 5. Marketing communications are very powerful and can have a huge impact on the society. Not only they can influence the buying behavior of the wider community, they can also impact the actions of society. For instance, if very powerful brand endorses about the importance of saving the water, not to use paper, people will be encouraged to do the same. For instance, Powerful brands like Nestle, Unilever, Disney spreads messages about environment, ecosystem, and protection of wild life as part of their corporate social responsibility and it had deep impact on people and at the same time, it helps organizations to improve their image and build credibility (Batra, Keller, 2016). 6. Some of the latest trends in marketing communications are heavy use of analytics to understand customers demand patterns and to ensure that the right audience should be targeted and the probability of converting leads into sales are high. Also, there is more stress on listening to the customers and thus making marketing communication more effective and interactive. Organizations have their Facebook page, twitter page and other software to track reviewers, influencers who are vocal about their brands. All this helps organizations to understand the customer expectations so as to meet them in a more effective way. Listening to customers also helps organizations to get key insights and suggestions, which encourage new product development for their future products (Kalajdzic, Zabkar, 2015). Apart from this, there is also trend of emotional marketing so that the customers can identify themselves with the brand. 7. Also, it is very important for the organizations to constantly revise their marketing communications strategy by making use of latest trends, knowledge and learnings gained by the experience. Also, the customers have high bargaining power these days and it is indispensable for the organizations to ignore the voice of the customers in these tough times. And competitors are also constantly coming up with latest technologies and new strategies to improve their communication strategy. As a result, it becomes impossible for the organizations to survive if they do not constantly improve their marketing communication strategy. 8. Some of the growing concerns of marketing communication is its ability to reach to the right audience. This is evident from the fact that usage of Ad blocking software is increasing because the users feel that ads are not relevant to them (Streitz, Tynan, 2016). Other concerns are related to ethical and moral issues. Sometimes, organizations uses puffery and deception strategy to increase their sales without understand that it is can simply destroy the brand if it is caught. Some organizations also hide label information or list of ingredients or mask them with their chemical names making it impossible to decipher them for the customers. References Arslanagic-Kalajdzic, M., Zabkar, V. (2015). The external effect of marketing accountability in business relationships: Exploring the role of customer perceived value.Industrial Marketing Management,46, 83-97. Batra, R., Keller, K. L. (2016). Integrating Marketing Communications: New Findings, New Lessons and New Ideas.Journal of Marketing. Hollensen, S. (2015).Marketing management: A relationship approach. Pearson Education. Huang, R., Sarigll, E. (2014). How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. InFashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors(pp. 113-132). Springer New York. Streitz, M., Tynan, R. (2016). Are ad-blockers killing the media? Speigel Onlines Matthias Streitz in a head-to-head debate with Privacy Internationals Richard Tynan.Index on Censorship,45(2), 78-80.