The way it might work

 To examine some of the theories behind how marketing communications might work  To think about the complexities associated with understanding how clients can best use marketing communications

 To explore the strategic context of marketing communications  To explain how marketing communications has developed  To re-engage with the role of marketing communications  To suggest ways in which marketing communications might work  To examine the concept of significant value  To consider the strengths and weaknesses of a model to explain how marcomms work

 Marketing communications is a rich mosaic of perceptions, emotions, attitudes, information and patterns of behaviour  This makes trying to understand how marketing communications might work challenging in itself  What’s needed is an appreciation of the complexity and contradictions intrinsic to this complicated commercial activity

 Long considered a purely operational activity – to deliver messages about products which, if effective, persuaded people to buy  No real consideration given to the bigger picture  Now silo approach has changed towards a more strategic orientation:-  Focus on wider range of stakeholders  Relationship marketing  Developments in digital technology and media applications  Controversy over IMC  Effective marcomms should complement marketing, business and corporate strategies

 In the beginning there was ADVERTISING  It was supported by other, separate promotional tools  The task of advertising was to deliver USPs  Based on product features  Related to attributes  USP short lived because of technology enable ‘me-toos’ and own brands:-  USP power eroded along with product differentiation as it was known then  Thus the power of advertising to differentiate was challenged and ESPs emerged

 Advertising’s role became more focused on developing brand values (based on emotion and imagery)  Such an approach to communication builds brand awareness, desire and aspirational involvement  But it does not offer rationale or explicit reason to purchase, i.e. no ‘call to action’  Other tools were needed to provide impetus to act: sales promotion, event marketing and eventually direct marketing evolved that were capable of creating behavioural change

 An expanded and more complex managerial tool  Capable of two providing two main solutions:-  Developing and maintaining brand values – strategically long term  Changing behaviour through the delivery of calls to action - strategically short term  The rise of below –the –line tools can be seen to indicate the demise of the USP, but also the increase in financial pressures for organisations to improve performance and returns on investment

 A dilemma for organisations:  to create brands that are perceived to be of value  yet encourage customers into purchasing behaviour  The question is – how much resource to allocate to creating brand value and how much to prompt behaviour  Engagement (buy-in) from target markets, which requires: -  An intellectual element – audiences process rational, functional information  An emotional element – audiences align themselves with emotional and expressive information  Considerations: information processing styles of audiences; access to preferred media; suitable balance between rational and emotional content  Remember DRIP and progression through the decision- making process

 Successful messages should be meaningful to the recipient:-  Targeted at the right audience  Capable of gaining attention  Be understandable, relevant and acceptable  Effective messages should fit the cognitive ability of the target audiences and follow the ‘model’ of how marketing communications work, but,  No single model but years of research have come up with some influential perspectives

 AIDA (Strong, 1925): Attention, Interest, Desire, Action  Hierarchy of Effects (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961): Awareness, Knowledge, Liking, Preference, Conviction, Purchase  Information Processing Model (McGuire, 1978): Presentation, Attention, Comprehension, Yielding, Retention, Behaviour

 What constitutes adequate levels of awareness, comprehension and conviction  How can you determine the stage reached by the target audience at any one time  Assumption that the consumer moves through the stages in a logical, rational manner: learn, then feel then do

 Cognitive processing tries to determine how external information is changed into meanings or thought patterns and then becomes judgements  Campaigns are developed and evaluated by assessing people’s thoughts (cognitive processes) as they read, view or hear a message.  Three types of cognitive response have been identified and linked to attitudes and intentions

Message or stimulus Product message thoughts Advert Execution thoughts Source- oriented thoughts Attitude to the product/ brand Attitude to the advert Purchase intentions (Lutz, Mackenzie and Belch, 1983)

Promotional message Attitude change An individual’s ability and motivation to process information Low High Central route Peripheral route and cues Peripheral route and cues The Elaboration Likelihood Model Petty and Cacioppo, (1983)

 Marcomms normally pass people by, unobserved  Those that are remembered have particular characteristics: -  Product different or new  Different or interesting execution of message  Message says something of personal significance to an individual in their current context  The net effect being that the message has to have significant value to an individual to be remembered  Research repeatedly shows that the ‘take out’ from an ad has to have intrinsic value to the recipient

St Revised relationship knowledge and/or purchase intentions Attitude to the message Associations and memories Awareness Experience Involvement Stimulus One-way or Two-way Message/Media triggers Brand triggers Transactional context Collaborative context Attitude to the brand Cognitive processing Emotions, feelings and likeability

 Strong, E.K. (1925), The Psychology of Selling, New York:McGraw-Hill  Lavidge, R.J. and Steiner, G.A.(1961), A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness, Journal of Marketing, (October) 61  McGuire, W.J. (1978), An information processing model of advertising effectiveness. In Behavioural and Management Science in Marketing (eds H.L.Davis and A.J. Silk), New York: Ronald/Wiley  Lutz, J, Mackenzie, S.B. And Belch, G.E (1983), Attitude towards the ad as a mediator of advertising effectiveness, Advances in Consumer Research, Assoc. for Consumer Research  Goldsmith, R.E and Lafferty, B.A. (2002), Consumer response to websites and their influence on advertising effectiveness. Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, 12(4),  Petty, R.E and Cacioppo, J.T. (1983), Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: application to advertising. In Advertising and Consumer Psychology (eds I.Percy and A.Woodside), 3-23, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books