You open the morning newspaper, and see an ad for a newly launched breakfast cereal; you lazily skim over it and just as you are about to get up, you notice a coupon stuck on a magazine for the same cereal. It is a trial coupon aimed at nudging you to sample the product.
You think no more of it and get ready to go to office. As you eat your breakfast and browse through television, there again you see a commercial for the same brand — it is an adaptation of what you saw in print except, of course, it is in audio-visual format. It is the same celebrity who beamed at you from the paper, now telling you why she consumes that cereal and the health benefits associated with it.
So in just a span of an hour, you got exposed to a new product advertising in three different formats — print, product coupon and television. Why do companies do this? Are they crazy to flood the same consumer with repeated ads, or are they trying something that they believe will have a higher impact?
Going by the efforts gone into such advertising, the answer seems to be the latter. Using various forms of communication to reach a consumer is called Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), and it is fast gaining favour among marketers.
There is usually a combination of media involved — television, print, radio, public relations, internet and the likes — to communicate about a certain brand. The idea behind using various media is the different levels of effectiveness each medium has. Hence consumers need to be given a dosage of many media together to increase the brand’s chances of success.
The challenges
But it is not easy as it sounds. There are many challenges associated with pulling off an integrated marketing campaign.
~ Skill sets involved : Not all companies are equipped with multiple talents, nor can they work across different types of media effectively. The ability to handle different agencies is suspect. Hence managing their performance becomes difficult.
~ Measurement : Unlike the traditional media of television, print, or radio, other forms of media do not lend themselves to easy evaluation. Metrics are not well defined and syndicated studies are not available. This makes it hard for marketers to choose one medium over another.
~ Costs : The third challenge has to do with costs. Using an integrated marketing campaign means availability of plenty of budget — both for fixed production costs of creative as well as media implementation. Only few companies will have this kind of resources at their disposal.
Why it’s still used
Despite the challenges, however, marketers are gearing up to use at least two to three media to persuade their consumers to try their product. How do they calculate the effective reach in such cases?
Obviously, merely adding up numbers across media will result in a lot of duplication. Hence the biggest aspect to take care of is “overlap” — i.e. one has to arrive at an unduplicated reach. This will enable companies to understand how many consumers have seen their advertisement at least once. Based on the impact of the creative message, this will translate into trials for their brands.
IMC is here to stay. With the advent of social media, and increased fragmentation of consumers across geographies, companies will need to continuously invent ways of reaching out to them creatively. So the next time you see Shah Rukh Khan smiling at you from a billboard and talking to you from the TV screen and singing a jingle over radio, you know what is at work.