marketing and sales

Cheung Yin Fan, Octo from City University of Hong Kong, Department of Marketing

Advertising is what my favorite study in University. Indeed, advertising plays a critical role on promote the products and brands, therefore, a well integrated marketing communication plan can help organizations to promote the product and service in the market effectively.

This book, which is written by Terence A. Shimp, provides a basic knowledge and information on design the well integrated marketing communication plan. And the book is divided into six parts as follows.

Part one
It is a introduction of the IMC program in the market and its role in brand equity enhancement.

Part two
It will consider the IMC in the customer・s perspective. Since the main role of IMC plan is communicating the message to customers and persuade the customer to make a purchase decision. It is necessary to understand how the customers think, therefore, auditor introduce the consumer processing model and hedonic experiential model.

The book mentions that a well IMC plan should identify the brand image first, and then understand the target customer needs and wants. It can help the marketers to know what the target customers concerns to make a purchase decision; therefore the marketers can design promotion strategy, which match the customers・ preference, provide some information and satisfy the customers・ requirement.

Part three
The auditor introduces the adoption and diffusion process with the broader issue of how an innovation is communicated and used to promote the new brands in the market.

Also it considers some factors that would affect to promote the new brands. They are opinion leadership, word of mouth, brands name, logos, packages, and point of purchase materials.

Part four
This part concerns about how to implement and manage an IMC plan. It consists of introducing the creative advertising strategy, endorsers and message appeals, the promotional channel, media planning and its analysis.

This part would be the main focus of the books since each task above would be the critical success factors on how the messages deliver in the market and persuade the customers.

Part five
This part consider on the sales promotion management, marketing oriented, public relations and sponsorships. The auditor introduces the promotional devices such as coupon and premiums which would help to implement the IMC plan. In the sponsorship marketing, the auditor introduces how to select the sponsorship events and its benefit on promotion.

Part six
Some external factors would also affect the effectiveness of IMC plan such as regulatory, ethical and ．Green・ issues. To have further understood on those external factors, the auditor describes the factors deeply by providing with examples MarCom.

Due to the study scheme, I just concern about a several part from part one to three in order to prepare the report and tests. Indeed, I love to read its book very much since it has a lot of pictures and examples to explain the comprehensive theory that can attract you to keep on reading. Moreover, the book contains broaden contents to help the reader to plan the IMC program.

And I would also like to recommend the auditors to add more globalize company as an example. Since there are all American companies as an examples in the book that it is not practical in Hong Kong. Moreover, I would suggest the auditor to do an overall summary with a chart or diagram so that the reader can get the focus of the book easily.

Moreover, I like the part of ．creating advertising strategy・ more even it does not have enough colorful pictures. Personally, I love to create advertising; therefore, I like to learn how to make a creative advertising. The auditor just introduces some styles of creating advertising strategies in general; however, it can stimulate me to think out of the box to create an advertisement.

Teresa Tsang from City University of Hong Kong, Marketing Department

Nowadays, companies need to differentiate them from other competitors in this competitive environment. Advertising is one of the important tools to communicate with customers that your company is different from other companies in terms of brand personality, product quality, service quality and other benefits, etc. Moreover, other promotional tools such as coupon, point of display, premium, etc. also can help to attract customers to buy the products. But advertising is the main communication tool to communicate with customers about the company・s offers and promotional campaign. Therefore, learning how to apply different advertising techniques and other promotional tools is a must in this competitive market.

Actually, my university uses this book as a textbook for the subject of ：Integrated Marketing Communications；. I found that this book gives us very useful information about advertising and promotion strategy. This book divides the content into six parts. Each part explains different concepts for readers. Part one is about the overview of integrated marketing communications (IMC) and its role in the brand-equity enhancement. It explains what IMC is and how IMC helps to enhance the brand equity.

Part two talks about positioning and targeting for marketing communications efforts and the communication process between the sender (marketer) and the receiver (customer). Moreover, Shimp explains the differences between consumer processing model and hedonic experiential model since marketers need to understand these models in order to use different advertising and promotional tools to appeal customers.

Part three is bout the marketing communications・ role in facilitating new product adoption since different marketing communications methods are used in different stages of product adoption. Moreover, Shimp also explains the roles of brand names, logos, packages, and point-of-purchases in promoting companies・ products and assisting sales.

Part four involves advertising management. It includes creative advertising strategy, endorsers and message appeals in advertising, and media planning, etc. Since advertising is very important in this competitive marketplace, learning how to apply advertising really can help companies to have better communications with customers about companies・ offers. Moreover, media plan can help marketers to plan which media is the most effective channels to deliver the persuasive messages to customers.

Part five explains trade-oriented and consumers-oriented sales promotion management, marketing public relations (MPR) and sponsorships marketing. Actually, public relation is also important to foster goodwill between the company and the public. Shimp has given different examples to explain proactive MPR and reactive MPR which help readers to understand the concepts easily.

Part six talks about the external pressures which include regulatory, ethical, and green issues on marketing communications. For example, there should not have misrepresentation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead the customers acting reasonably in the circumstances. Therefore, there is a need for marketers to practice ethical advertising; otherwise, it will damage companies・ reputation and lose customers.

We can see that this book can teach us much useful knowledge about advertising, promotion and other marketing communications approaches. I believe that better use of marketing communications can project better image and deliver clearer messages to customers. Moreover, successful advertising can project a good impression in customers・ hearts for a long time. Therefore, this book can help readers to grasp the knowledge of integrated marketing communications and apply in real situation to build companies・ reputation and gain more customers. I hope that all readers can also enjoy reading this book and find useful knowledge from this book.

To communicate effectively and efficiently with the customers, only advertising, the most common way people think of, is not enough. Supplemental tools have to be integrated with it to implement the most relevant form of persuasive communication program. How? The book "Advertising, Promotion and Supplemental Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communications" can help you a lot.

This book is very clear and comprehensive. Shimp first explains why IMC is very important in modern marketing and defines what IMC is. Then, he focuses on the perspective of customers and provides us with different useful tools including promotion, packaging and branding strategies, point-of-purchase communication, market-oriented public relations, event-and-cause oriented sponsorship and personal selling, to write an IMC plan in order to communicate with the target audience with the right message and the right methods, so that resources will not be wasted in the irrelevant areas.

This book is very rich in content. Examples and applications are widely used. A detailed example is given at the beginning in each chapter. And there are a lot of articles quoted in the parts of IMC FOCUS and GLOBAL FOCUS from different journal and research that can let us know more about the related topics.

It is easy to understand as well. Some theories are illustrated by charts and diagrams. And sometimes advertisements are shown to make the theories more concrete. The advertisements can also enhance the visual impact and arouse our interest to read the book.

Marketing communication is very important for the success of a company. Want to know more about it. Read the book!!!