Elements of the Marketing Communication Mix
Advertising refers to any paid promotion of products, services or ideas by an identified sponsor. Personal selling is the second most common method to communicate the benefits of your products to the end customer and convert him from a lead to a prospect and ultimately to your customer. Along with this, the company’s salesman will also have more knowledge of product and competition as he has been dedicatedly hired by the brand. At the same time, the retail salesman might not be as knowledgeable as the brand salesman because he has so many brands and products to sell.
He gets overloaded and ultimately forgets the features of the products he is selling. So, if a company wants to communicate the benefits of its products, and convince and convert the customer, then personal selling with hand-picked and trained executives is the best option. There are many different ways of running sales promotions and many different tips and tactics present depending on the sector you are in. Where trade discounts and freebies work very well in FMCG, in consumer durables, free services and value addition works better than discounts.
Sales promotion also involves providing the consumer with an incentive for the purchase of the product. At the same time, it may involve giving incentives to dealers or distributors to get the product selling & moving in the market. The expenses in Sales promotion are lower and the investment is very less because it gets the product moving. Sales promotions are increasingly being used as a tool, especially after the rising popularity of E-commerce and online sales.
Due to some discounts being given for a certain amount of time, online retailers can move huge quantities of products across the country or the region they are selling in. Public relations is the art of spreading the news about your products or services in the public domain so that some hype is created and people talk to each other about it. One of the most commonly observed public relations exercises is when there is some news related to a Movie or related to a product which is published in the newspapers just before the movie is supposed to be released or the product is supposed to be launched. Similarly, there are multiple public relations exercises which can be carried out by a brand.
Similarly, press conferences, face-to-face interaction with consumers, newspaper advertorials, and involving the community are various ways that public relations exercises can be implemented. Public relation is an important part of the communications mix. This is nothing else but Public relations wherein the marketing manager wants the public to be hooked on what’s about to happen in the movie. Off course, some movies would rather hide their details than show them to the public.
In the last few years, Digital marketing was giving tough competition to television advertising as well as newspaper advertising. As of the end quarter of 2016, digital marketing has practically overtaken Television advertising and has a major spend amongst all media. But even then, not only small businesses, even top brands take part in digital marketing because it helps the brand in reaching the end consumer. The key attraction of digital marketing is the personal connection that the brand makes with the consumer.
Your email box, your Facebook wall, and your Twitter feed are your private space and via social marketing, brands can enter this private space and make a connection. Although the packaging is supposed to be a part of the marketing mix and not the communications mix, lately, due to competition and the increasing rivalry between businesses, even packaging is considered as an important medium of communicating with your consumers. The packaging of the product is the last point of sales for the company. When the consumer is standing in a retail aisle, he or she has a plethora of products in front of them to choose from.
However, if the packaging is poor, and the distinguishing feature is not mentioned clearly, the consumer might ignore the product altogether. As a result, even if packaging communicates to the consumer, it is now considered as an element of the communications mix.
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