PBL session 6

Marketing Communication Plan

1. Compare different marketing communication planning models: what are the stages?

In Belgium I studied the book Communicatie Handboek (Wil Michels, 2013), which is in Dutch. The book had an entire chapter about Marketing Communications and was structured according to a marketing communication plan. 

The steps were as follows (translated to English from Dutch):

1. Decide the core value of the brand: what does the brand stand for? What's its DNA? What makes it unique? 
2. Research (customers, competition and society): why do people buy something? What do the competitors do? What lives in the society?
3. Decide the marketing communication target market: who do you aim for? This stage involves segmentation
4. Decide the marketing communication goals: what do you want to achieve?
5. Decide the proposition: what do you promise your clients?
6. Decide the marketing communication strategy: how are we going to achieve the goals?
7. Concept: what's going to be the overall coherent concept
8. Choose your media: which combination are you going to make?
9. Budget: what's that going to cost you?
10. Execution: execute all the plans
11. Evaluation: was the campaign successful?

In a Marketing Communication course I had last year, we also followed some steps. These were a bit shorter:

1. Research
2. Target market
3. Goals
4. Strategy
5. Creative brief

Let's now have a look at some other examples. 

According to Deborah Spector, there are these steps:

1. Goals and objectives
2. Identify and profile audiences
3. Develop messages and identify messengers
4. Messages and credible messengers
5. Develop strategies
6. Select communication channels
7. Implement the plan
8. Build in evaluation points
9. Measure succes

Another website (6pmarketing) suggests these steps:

1. The better you know your audience, the better you (and your team) can appeal to their interests: everything begins with a thorough understanding of your audience. Why would they want your product? This involves research.
2. Uncover your unique selling proposition: what's your main benefit? Which problem can you solve?
3. Sharpen your brand look and feel: from logo to business cards. Align everything with the USP.
4. Ensure that all messaging is consistent: use a tagline, some words...
5. Choose your marketing mix: understand your options and make a mix that will work for everyone
6. Establish marcom success measurements: ensure that your communications are measurable
7. Manage leads and client data: create a CRM database

This one's in Dutch, but I think it's quite a good one, so I'll translate the main steps. The visual that accompanies it is quite useful, so I'll put the Dutch words beside the English ones here underneath, so you can maybe understand the visual as well. 

1. Communication goals (doelstellingen): what are you aiming for? 
2. Target markets (doelgroepen): who do you want to reach? Who is the ideal client?
3. Strategy (strategie): how are you going to do it?
4. Budget (budget): how much is this going to cost?
5. Media choice and message (mediakeuze en boodschap): which media are you going to use and which message do you want to bring on them?
6. Evaluation: how did it go?

Here are some other visuals that may be useful:

Generally speaking we can see a lot of factors return. It usually starts with research about the market, the competition and the customers. Afterwards you usually think about your own business. What is your USP? Then, you identify the target market and goals you want to achieve. More practical, you start to choose the media, strategy and the message you want to transfer. All considering your budget as well. Afterwards you execute the plan and you evaluate. 

2. Discuss the different stages of the marketing communication planning process

I'll use my book Communicatiehandboek (Michels), which I mentioned in the previous question for this section. It is very elaborate, so I'll shorten it to the essentials. 

Step 1: decide the core value of the brand

What does the brand stand for? What's its DNA? What makes it unique? In this stage, you have to decide your brand vision and mission. Besides, you have to pick a core value (usually not more than 3). If you look at the core value from Volvo for example, you can see they aim for 'safety'. 

2. Research

Research is super important. You can divide it into different pieces:

• Problem analysis: what needs to be solved? What's the cause? What's going to happen if it isn't solved?
• Internal analysis: analyse your organisational structure (formalisation, centralisation...), the culture (symbols, rituals...) and the leadership style
• External analysis: 
• Meso analysis: who are the stakeholders and actors? Get to know them. Also analyse your competition (for example with Porter's 5 forces model).
• Macro analysis: usually, the last thing you do, after all the other research is to make a SWOT-analysis

3. Decide the marketing communication goals

Usually, a goal can be of 1 of these three categories:

• Knowledge
• Attitude (emotions)
• Behaviour

The most common marketing communication goals are:

• Stimulate the category need
• Stimulate brand familiarity
• Stimulate brand knowledge
• Change a brand attitude
• Create a behaviour intention
• Facilitate behaviour
• Stimulate buying behaviour

4. Decide the proposition

A proposition is the main thing you promise your customers if they buy it. It's sometimes also called the what's in it for me?

5. Decide the marketing communication strategy

There are a lot of strategies you can use. You now have to think about which one is the most useful to convey your audience about your product or service. 

You can either decide between a push- or pull strategy, or between a theme or action strategy. If you go international, you also need to make a decision on whether  you want a global, adaptation or differentiation strategy. 

6. Concept

You need to think about how to package your message into a concept. This is quite abstract, but you need to think about it as follows: for example, your message is 'eat more apples from your own country'. Usually, those apples are not as perfect as an imported apple. A way of showing this message in an original way (concept) is to show people that imperfect apples are more charming. You will then probably choose folders, tv-commercials etc in which you always show the same concept 'imperfection is charming'. It's not something very concrete, it's more of a guideline. 

7.  Choose your media

This may seem simple, but it's definitely not. Usually, if you did good research, it will be more easy to decide the media, since you know where to find the target market. These days, customers have less attention left for advertising, so you'll definitely need to be present in more than 1 medium to deliver the message.

8. Budget

A budget can limit or open options.

9. Execution

Launch the campaign.

10. Evaluation

It's so important to evaluate and discover where things went wrong or what went well and why. So you can improve yourself in the future. 

3. What are the characteristics of a successful marketing communication plan or campaign?

5 key elements of a successful marketing plan according to the site Potential:

1. Conducting SWOT and PESTND (or DESTEP) analyses
2. Analysing the competition and understanding differentiated point(s) of value. You can identify your main competitors and look at where you can stand out.
3. Knowing the product(s) and defining target market(s). Segment your target audience and look at the benefit of what you're selling.
4. Setting marketing goals and metrics. Establish quantifiable marketing goals and track your performance.
5. Budgeting: what can be done in house and what needs to be outsourced?

Another one comes from Bridgesstrategies:

1. A successful marketing program is agile
2. A savvy marketing strategy is a lead generating machine that can show the ROI (that's always the goal)
3. The best marketing programs inform other parts of the business (marketing is not a vacuum)
4. Marketing is engaging
5. Great marketing doesn't feel like marketing

And a last one from Randallreilly:

1. The customer is the hero. People like to feel central to the message.
2. A clearly defined goal, otherwise you won't know if your campaign was successful
3. Highly targeted messaging. Don't use a one-size fits all. The more personal, to more it gets our attention.
4. Highly targeted audiences. Think about where your audience is.
5. Integrated, multi-channel marketing. Think about which medium for which audience. 

4. Discuss the marketing communication plan of a chosen company

I couldn't really find a good example online, so I'll analyse it myself. Let's take the example I had last week from Dove. 

. 

1. Core value: Doves core value is always to make people aware of the fact that they're beautiful
2. Research: Dove conducted a lot of research in advance about women and their lack of self-esteem and the fact they they view themselves as less pretty than they are. 
3. Communication goals: there's a lot of attitude focus in this campaign. It's all about emotions. You can see the women crying in the video after they see the sketches and that's what Dove wants to evoke in the target market as well. It's to make a good association with Dove as a brand. 
4. Proposition: you're more beautiful than you think you are. Dove will give you that self-esteem. 
5. Strategy: Dove chose to show women the difference between how they see themselves and how others see them next to each other. A very strong choice. 
6. Concept: the way Dove wanted to show women they lack self-esteem, is to make them describe themselves and afterwards let them compare it with how someone else did.
7. Media: Dove used a video, flyers, posters, social media, website...
8. Budget: I have no information about how much the campaign would cost
9. Execution
10. Evaluation