Aantekeningen papers Marcom
Paper 1: Unlocking the Power of Integrated Marketing Communications:
How Integrated Is Your IMC Program? (Keller)
Marketing communications are one of the most difficult but crucially important components of
modern marketing. In recent years this challenge has been made even more complicated by the
explosion of new digital media options. With so many different new and traditional communication
options available—and so many different ways to combine those options—marketers struggle with
how to make good marketing communication decisions.
A crucial ingredient for many of the communication success stories is a well-developed integrated
marketing communications (IMC) program. What marketers need is a set of well-grounded,
comprehensive criteria by which any proposed IMC program can be systematically and thoroughly
judged. Marketers need to know which questions to ask to make sure their agency or agencies have
done their due diligence to truly optimize the design of their IMC program.
The overriding theme to our discussion is that in assembling an IMC program to build brand equity,
marketers should “mix and match” communication options—that is, choose a variety of different
communication options which may share some common meaning and content but which may also
offer different, complementary advantages or be designed with other communication options in
mind. Mixing thus involves choosing multiple communication options on the basis of their different
capabilities and likely communication effects on sales and brand equity.
, Coverage (dekking): If there is little audience overlap, communication effectiveness is largely
driven by contribution and complementarity. With little audience overlap, the
communications program is really not integrated; it is more a case of multiple marketing
communications. If overlap exists with an audience, however, many more considerations
come into play. Then, the relationship of the overlapping communication options becomes
critical in terms of commonality, complementarity, and cross-effects. The sequencing of
communications becomes critical too, and the conformability of any communication option
to the particular spot(s) in the sequences where it is seen.
Costs (kosten): Importantly, the growth of big data allows market researchers to gain access
to many potentially useful new data resources never before available. To properly estimate
the response functions to the exposure levels of the different options of an integrated
marketing communication program, however, market researchers must adopt a fully
dynamic, longitudinal view of when and how cross-effects occur across different media and
the temporal sequences (downstream effects) involved.
Contribution (bijdrage): contribution describes the “main effects” of a marketing
communication option in terms of how it affects consumers’ processing of a communication
and the outcomes which result. To assess the contribution of any communication option, it is
important to understand the totality of communication effects it creates and all the progress
and accomplishments it achieves against the different communication objectives.
Commonality (gemeenschappelijkheid): the extent to which info conveyed by different
communication options shares meaning or elicits similar effects across communication
options. Therefore, in the long run, marketers often need to design different communication
options and coordinate their message appeals, so they work effectively together to reinforce
important, differentiating brand benefits and for consistent and cohesive brand image.
Complementarity (complementair): Marketers must convey information, elicit emotions,
and create other effects to impact decision making for different types of consumers at
different stages of their decision journey or day-to-day living. The ideal IMC program would
ensure some communication options would be chosen that are mutually compensatory and
reinforcing to create the desired consumer knowledge structures as reflected by brand
positioning. Complementarity is critical to developing a rich, cohesive brand image.
Cross-effects (kruiseffecten): The basic idea behind cross-effects is to strategically boost
communication effects with consumers as a result of exposure to one communication option
that, in addition to any direct effect, also creates enhanced communication effects for
different communication options after their subsequent exposure.
o Meaning-based cross-effects: attempt to coordinate the content of communication
options so that the brand knowledge or communication effect created or
emphasized by one communication option increased the likelihood that another
communication option achieves its communication objectives as consumers move
along their decision journey.
o Execution-based cross-effects: attempt to coordinate the creative strategy of
communication options to ensure executional consistency such that greater
attention or processing results with subsequent communication exposure.
Conformability (schikken/passen): Finally, even if communication options are designed to
create cross-effects with one another, it may be the case that less than perfect targeting and
overlap exists in the exposure to the communication options involved. With any IMC
program, consumers will encounter communications in different orders or sequences, if at
all. For whatever reason, certain target consumers may not be exposed to an intended
communication option or be exposed to a communication option not intended for them.
, o Communication conformability: the ability of a marketing communication to work at
two levels. Effectively communicating to consumers who have or have not seen and
will or will not see other communications for the brand.
o Consumer conformability: how well it informs or persuades target market
consumers who vary on dimensions other than their communication history.
There are two main ways to apply the IMC choice criteria: The bottom-up approach evaluates each
individual communication option making up the IMC program; the top-down approach evaluates the
proposed IMC program as a whole and considers how well the IMC program collectively satisfies the
IMC choice criteria. The top-down approach is ultimately what marketers care about, as it addresses
the fundamental question of what communication program to put forth. With its focus on individual
communication options, however, the bottom-up approach can offer valuable insights to inform the
top-down approach and is a natural first step in the process.
Notes lecture:
IMC choice criteria (“the 7 C’s”):
Coverage: proportion of target group reached by each comm option
Cost: financial efficiency
Contribution: ability to achieve the desired communication effect
Communality: extent to which communication option achieves similar effects as other
options
Complementarity: extent to which communication option achieves different effects as other
options
Cross-effects: to what extent do options work together? Interaction effects
Conformability: extent to which option works across different target groups?
Paper 2: Audience involvement in advertising: Four levels. (Greenwald,
Leavitt)
Krugman's seminal observation was that there are two entirely different ways of experiencing and
being influenced by mass media. One way is characterized by lack of personal involvement. The
second is characterized by a high degree of personal involvement. By this we do not mean attention,
interest, or excitement but the number of conscious "bridging experiences," connections, or personal
references per minute that the viewer makes between his own life and the stimulus. With low
involvement one might look for gradual shifts in perceptual structure, aided by repetition, activated
by behavioural-choice situations, and followed at some time by attitude change. With high
involvement one would look for the classic, more dramatic, and more familiar conflict of ideas at the
level of conscious opinion and attitude that precedes changes in over behaviour.
There is consensus that high involvement means personal relevance or importance. Further, it is
generally accepted that communication influences can occur with low involvement, and that the
mechanism of communication impact for low involvement is different from that for high
involvement.
, 4 levels of audience involvement:
Pre-attention: little or no capacity required (automatic processing)
Focal attention: little capacity required
Comprehension: modest levels of capacity required
Elaboration: substantial levels of capacity required
The table summarizes a variety of laboratory procedures for inducing the different levels of
involvement. Although these laboratory methods are typically not directly transferrable to natural
settings, still the principles that underlie them are. We can identify four such principles:
1. Bottom-up (data-driven) processing. When low-level analyses detect indications of significant
message content, the next higher level of analysis is invoked.