Chapter 1. The nature of marketing communications

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1.1. The Marketing Mix And Promotion Management

Along with marketing in general, the importance of marketing communications has dramatically increased. Indeed, effective communications with customers is critical to the successful functioning of any organization.

Business enterprises, ranging from the smallest retailers to the largest manufacturers, as well as not-for-profit organizations (such as churches, museums, and symphony orchestras), continuously promote themselves to their customers and clients in an effort accomplish a variety of purposes:

1) informing prospective customers about their products, services, and terms of sale;

2) persuading people to choose particular products and brands, shop in certain stores, attend certain entertainment events, and perform a variety of other behaviors;

3) including action from customers so that their behavior is directed toward the marketer’s offering and is undertaken immediately rather than delayed.

These and other objectives are achieved by using advertisements, salespeople, store signs, point-of-purchase displays, product packages, direct-mail literature, free samples, coupons, publicity releases, and other communication devices.

Collectively, the preceding activities constitute what traditionally has been termed the promotion management component of the marketing mix. As you will recall from an introductory marketing course, the marketing mix for a brand consists of four sets of decisions that have been referred to as the 4 Ps:

1) product decisions (the choice of design, shape, color, package, brand symbolism, and so on),

2) pricing decisions (such as price level and discount structure),

3) place, or distribution, decisions (choice of channels and retail outlets),

4) promotion decisions (advertising, personal selling, and so forth).

Note that the last marketing mix element, promotion, is the aspect of general marketing on which this text will focus. However, the term promotion management, although rich in tradition and historically preferred by many marketing educators, has more recently been supplanted with the more descriptive and encompassing term, marketing communications. Since this is the term used by marketing practitioners, we will employ it here as well.

Marketing communications can be understood best by examining the nature of its two constituent elements, communication and marketing. Communication is the process whereby thoughts are conveyed and meaning is shared between individuals or between organizations and individuals. Marketing is the set of activities whereby businesses and other organizations create transfers of value (exchanges) between themselves and their customers. Of course, marketing is more general than marketing communications per se, but much of marketing involves communications activities. Taken together, marketing communications represent the collection of all elements in a brand’s marketing mix that facilitate exchanges by establishing shared meaning with the brand’s customers or clients.