IMC AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

IMC AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION - Essay Example In recent years, Integrated Marketing Communication, a newly emerging and young academic framework, has become a very strategic and magical bullet that is found to help a firm achieve sustainable competitive advantage. IMC is a careful coordination of varying promotional tools such as sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, event marketing, public relation with a view to facilitate effective brand communication along with ensuring of consistency in every message (Lamb, hair and McDaniel, 2008,p. 413). This paper discusses the advertising strategy of Milky Way and explains different promotional strategies, measuring of the effectiveness of advertising and marketing research approach. Milky Way’s advertising Strategy Milky Way bar, a chocolate bar distributed by Mars Incorporated Company headquartered in Mclean, USA, is one of the most admired and widely renowned chocolate brand name across the world. In 2012, the company launched an ad campaign labeled ‘Sorry, I w as eating a Milky Way’ to attract targeted market to a feeling that the bar is particularly irresistible. The advertising strategy used in this ad campaign seems more or less to be affective advertising strategy. Literatures including Clow and Baack (2004, p. 231) and Shimp (2008, p. 225) identified the very basic advertising strategies, that are cognitive strategy, affective strategy and brand strategy. Affective advertising strategy elicits emotions, feelings and perceptions so as to affect the reasoning process of targeted audience which in turn lead them to take a proper action (Clow and Baack, 2004, p. 234). Milky Way’s adverting campaign in the print media labeled ‘Sorry I was eating a Milky Way’ is shown in the figure below. This advertising integrated both resonance and emotional advertising techniques. This advertising provides both resonant and emotional messages to customers that a bride is quite unlikely to be present on time when she was enjoy ing the gooey caramel tastes of the Milky Way. Arens, Weigold and Arens (2008, p. 340) noted that resonance in advertising refers to echoing, reverberating and vibrating. Milky Way’s advertising is meant to catch the imagination of audience. Emotional advertising tries to reflect emotions that motivate customers’ recall of product and choice. Emotions such as reliability, happiness, pleasure, passion etc are connected to Milky Way’s advertising message. Milky Way’s advertising is meant to attract customers attraction and to influence them to recall the brand name and thus to build brand image. Measuring the effectiveness of Advertising There are basically four outcomes of an advertising effort, they are; 1) recognition and recall, 2) emotional reaction, 3) persuasion and 4) sales responses. Shimp (2008, p. 289) has clearly outlined certain techniques that can help measuring the effectiveness of an advertising. To measure the recognition and recall of cust omers, Shimp (2008, p. 289) suggests Starch Readership Service, a testing service of a company named GfK Custom Research North America to measure the reader awareness of customers through magazines, Buzzone Research Company to research consumers’ recognition through TV and Day-after recall testing to test customers’ recall after one-day of the advertisement. To measure the emotional reactions, Shimp (2008, p. 289) suggests brain imaging of customers with help of neuroscience, self-reporting of customers and physiological tests to measure any of several autonomous reactions of customers to advertising. To m