Role of Advertising in Consumer Decision Making Assignment Sample

Integrated Marketing Communications - Question 1

1. When any marketer prepares themselves to advertise new products or service for its customer, it is important to rely on in depth research to consider type of media for the launch. Different media offers different benefits, the goal is to select the best medium which fulfils the needs of the product or services (Geskey, 2014). The factors for choosing right mediums are the objective of the organization, nature of the product, what is the potential market, budget of the advertisement campaign, cost of the medium, classification of the audience based on demographic, psychographic and behavioural factors and the extent of the coverage.
2. GRP stands for gross rating point, which is a standard measure in advertising which measures the impact of the advertising campaign within a particular period (Neijens & Voorveld, 2015). One gross rating point is equivalent to reaching one per cent of the potential customers. The term explains, how often the advertising message must be delivered to the audience or how often the audience must have seen the advertisement. GRP is used in both marketing planning and marketing performance review. As it is a gross rating point, it includes duplication of audience. GRP can be calculated by multiplication of reach and frequency of the campaign or multiplication of impressions by 100 dividing the sum with target audience.
3. Advantage of adopting gross rating point metric is that It helps the marketer to define who the target audience are and how to approach those target audience on which platform. Another advantage is that it guides the marketer regarding how to allocate the budget on different mediums and how are they bring spend effectively. Although it does not measure the campaign’s profitability which is one of the biggest weakness. It includes duplication of the audience which results into over estimation of the campaign budget and campaign results.

Integrated Marketing Communications - Question 2

Direct marketing is a form of marketing practice which relies on direct communication or distribution to customers, rather than supplying products through third party such as E-commerce platform (Forsyth, 2014). Direct marketing consists of personalised online and off-line mail, social media, brochures, and personalised phone calls. Direct marketing generally eliminates the middle man such as advertising media which is why it is called direct marketing. The call to action is an overall goal of any direct marketing campaign as any response from the recipient results a positive indicator. Direct marketing campaign often target list of potential customers, in order to get the highest return on investment.

1. Direct marketing is becoming an important component in an integrated marketing communication programme in many organizations. As any other marketing activities, direct marketing directly affects the sales results of the organization. Integrated marketing communication includes promotion, internet marketing, personal selling, public relations, and advertising direct marketing supports these marketing activities by coordinating with each of them based on target audiences. Role of Direct marketing include to create a recall value and induce a call to action among the customer by informing them about the organization’s current marketing activity (Karaxha, et.al,2016).
2. A good direct marketing campaign will help the marketers to focus on promoting the product or service while collecting response of their audience but it will also help to generate call to action among the audiences. The marketing practice can be used by any marketer when they are having limited resources or when they want to test their marketing. For example, When Nestle introduced their chunky bar, they sent mailer that resembled like card left by postman when they were unable to deliver the parcel. Similarly, Land Rover in Liverpool used an innovate way of inviting the customer by inserting balloon inside the box with tags attached for invitation along with company’s marketing message.

Integrated Marketing Communications - Question 3

Integrated marketing communication (IMC) includes various marketing programmes such as sales promotion, advertising, direct marketing, public relations, internet marketing and so on. Each marketing element contribute differently towards the effectiveness of the programme. It is difficult to measure the impact of these overall activities towards the sales of the products or services as whole as target market cannot be easily identified for measuring the effectiveness of overall IMC (Juska, 2017). Each marketing element target different audience with different purpose to achieve the overall goal of the organization. Along with it, marketer run multiple campaigns at the same time at various platform creating a complex web of data, hence it is difficult to measure the effectiveness.

1. Measuring is an important aspect of any marketing communication as it defines the effectiveness of the promotion mix of any product or service. There are two most popular areas for measuring the effectiveness to the campaigns that is communication effect and sales effect. Communication effect helps to define the overall effectiveness of the communication message for the IMC, for which methods used to calculate are direct rating method. Here customers are asked direct to rate the marketing communication in a questionnaire. Portfolio test, here customers are shown promotion mix of the organisation and they are asked whether they can recall the message and laboratory test where in a set environment, customer’s eye movement, blood pressure and body movement are calculated to measure the effectiveness of the campaign (Reinold & Tropp, 2013).
2. Frequent measurement of effectiveness of the marketing campaign plays a vital role in the success of it. The managerial responsibility of the marketer does not end after executing the campaign, but to measure the effectiveness of it and to find any deviation. Measure the effectiveness helps the marketers to determine weather the campaigns are targeting the right audiences with right message or not. Along with it, it enables the marketers to measure the strengths, weakness and return of interest of the campaign so that marketers can make changes accordingly(Juska, 2017).

Integrated Marketing Communications - Question 5

Advertising influences majority of the household decision to purchase the product or service. This only includes traditional media advertising such as television, radio or newspaper and new media such as internet, and mobile advertising. With availability of various mediums for advertising, offering various benefits and for various audiences, television has been one of the most primary choices for advertisers for advertising products and services (Norries, et.al,2013). Television is considered as a mass medium covering wide area of audiences removing the barrier of language and visibility. Yet it is still offering little selectivity to the advertisers.

Television advertising can be referred as means of conveying advertisers’ message to its target audience about the product or service (Kumar & Raju, 2013). Television advertising allows the advertisers to show the demonstration of products or services to the wide audiences and demonstrates the benefits of using it. It allows the advertisers to convey message with sight, sound, and graphics, which gives the business, products or service an instant credibility. It gives an opportunity to be as creative as possible and create an emotional connection with the audience to create the customer loyalty among the brands.

Television being considered as mass medium, covering larger audiences, it lacks the ability to deliver the advertisement to highly potential customer compared to other media outlets such as direct marketing campaigns. Television networks are attempting to improve the targeting efforts yet they are still considered offering limited selectivity. Television remains the best option for those advertisers who want to target broad market, irrespective of the geographical and language barrier (Ewing, 2013). Today via internet and mobile marketing, the customers are changing the media consumption habit while influencing the marketers to target them as precisely as they can to promote their product or services.

There are several new technological innovations and tactics which helps the TV marketers to maximise their media investments. From buying audiences based on real-world behaviour, to targeting specific audiences, to measuring the impact of ads, there are various new factors helping marketers target their audiences as specific as they can to achieve maximum return on investment. Few methods to improve the selectivity are as follows. Today network operators and channel producers are introducing more narrowly theme programme and channels for its audiences of different demographics and geography. Hence advertisers can target those audience who are termed as potential customer to maximise the advertising effectiveness.

Today with the introduction of addressable television, advertisers can purchase audiences using household level profiling and segmentation to deliver diverse television ads to different households watching the same programme (Proulx & Shepatin, 2013). By evaluating the potential customer who are likely to buy the product or service, advertisers can divert customised ads directly to the audiences who can resonate with the ad. Audiences are the valuable currency for buying television space by the advertisers. For advertisers, who is leveraging everything on its audience’s new technology such as intelligence is valuable. It helps the marketers to map the offline customer journey through real-world actions such as in-store visits, number of visits, brand loyalty, customer retention, and many more factors. Gathering these data helps the advertiser to target audiences based on proven customer behaviour research earning most refined audiences.

Integrated Marketing Communications - Question 6

KFC Australia, has been seen as incorporating the possibility of switching towards digital advertising while moving away from television advertising. The brand used the app event, value and retention optimization on Facebook to lower the cost per install for its mobile app by 28 per cent while increasing the purchases by 12 per cent. Today, KFC Australia run a range of video, photo and mobile application-based ads which are designed to encourage mobile app installation and to create engagement among its customers. The company integrate the marketing practiced by Facebook software development kit and Facebook analytics to generate the useful insights of its audience and their purchase journey. Through this insight, the brand targets its potential audiences and regular customers, by offering customised messaged on various platforms. The company believes, it is easier to generate information of the user as compared to knowing about their customer via traditional advertising (Facebook, n.d).

Over a decade, advertising has gone through a fundamental shift from traditional advertising to digital advertising. Pragmatic marketing platforms such as Facebook, google have raise the bar for digital advertising, reducing the focus on traditional advertising, in which long term contracts offered the agencies control over the brands communication strategy, media budget an allocation. Today marketer believe that online marketing is the best way to target the audience through email newsletter, social media marketing, search engine marketing and many more as it will produce more effective result. Today most of the audience are active more on internet these days as compared to traditional platforms.

Yet traditional marketing still has leverage in advertising world, because fraction of people still prefers traditional medium for their daily entertainment. The primary purpose of advertising is to promote a product or service to the target audience. However, each marketer aims to attract and earn as many customers as possible, hence focusing on only one medium will not generate the effective result as marketer aims to, instead it will only cover certain portion of the online or offline audience. An example from the Pepsi can be inferred into the study who lost enormous money because they preferred to target their audiences only on social media and discontinued the traditional mode of advertising.

Hence it is important for a marketer to focus on both forms of media, to attract larger customer base as possible. In order to coordinate these marketing activities marketer is opting for online mode of advertising for inducing call to action by visiting into their store or by making a purchase. Hence it is important for a marketer to understand the importance of both means of advertising and not to consider both as opposite to each other instead consider them as complimentary means. Marketers who understands the importance can utiliza the strengths and by this way he will be able to maximise the marketing effort and generate the best result from the campaigns.

References for Role of Advertising in Consumer Decision Making

Ewing, M. T. (2013). The good news about television: Attitudes aren't getting worse: Tracking public attitudes toward TV advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 53(1), 83-89.

Forsyth, P. (2014). Direct marketing in a week maximize sales through direct mail in seven simple steps (1st ed.). London: John Murray Press.

Facebook, (n.d). KFC Australia: Increasing installs and sales with Facebook app event, value and retention optimization. Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/business/success/kfc-australia .

Geskey, R. (2014). Media planning & buying in the 21st century (1st ed.). New York: Createspace Independent Pub.

Juska, J. (2017). Integrated Marketing Communication Advertising and Promotion in a Digital World (1st ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.

Kumar, D. P., & Raju, K. V. (2013). The role of advertising in consumer decision making. IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 14(4), 37-45.

Karaxha, M., Tolaj, M., & Abazi, D. (2016). The Role of Direct Marketing in Relation with the Consumers in Kosovo. Retrieved from http://iliriapublications.org/index.php/iir/article/view/223

Norris, C., Colman, A., & Aleixo, P. (2013). Selective Exposure to Television Programmes and Advertising Effectiveness. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17(5).

Neijens, P., & Voorveld, H. (2015). Cross-Platform Advertising: Current Practices and Issues for the Future: Why the Gross Rating Point Metric Should Thrive in Today's Fragmented Media World. Journal of Advertising Research, 55(4), 362-367.

Proulx, M., & Shepatin, S. (2013). Social TV: How marketers can reach and engage audiences by connecting television to the web, social media, and mobile. Canada: Jhon Wiley & Sons.

Reinold, T., & Tropp, J. (2013). Integrated marketing communications: how can we measure its effectiveness?. Journal Of Marketing Communications, 18(2), 113-132.

Remember, at the center of any academic work, lies clarity and evidence. Should you need further assistance, do look up to our Marketing Assignment Help