In the past decade, the media landscape has changed dramatically affecting how marcoms are implemented. The media has become fragmented and is increasingly digitised. Consumers can now instantly access brand information from multiple websites using multiple devices, and this is not counting the rise of social media. The job of a marcoms manager has become extremely complex. But here is the good news: it also means greater creative possibilities. The objective of this chapter is to help a marcoms manager negotiate this complexity. To this end, the marcoms manager should understand the strengths and weaknesses of different communication channels and be guided by a set of principles.

This chapter is about media planning and budgeting in advertising. Many industries spend as much as one-third of their profit (not revenue) on media and promotions. A media plan that is not well thought out and executed will affect the company’s bottom line very quickly. Although this chapter is principally about media planning and budgeting, it is also about communication objectives and consumer behaviour. If we do not understand where and when consumers buy our product or service, we will not be able to place and time our advertisement to best influence them as well. If we understand these, then we can decide on the most cost-effective channel, the best time and the ideal frequency to reach them with the right media vehicles. Factoring into this decision is whether the organisation wants to grow. If so, then being able to reach as many consumers as possible becomes important aided by having distinctive creative assets and excess share of voice. Each of these decisions has implications for the budget and so media planning and budgeting is quite a complex exercise. And this complexity is compounded as more online channels and platforms become available, although the advent of programmatic media buying improves the efficiency of ad placements, notwithstanding its weaknesses.

This chapter is about evaluating the effectiveness of an ad and the subsequent campaign. This is an important chapter because a bad ad can hurt a brand even with a single exposure, and a good ad of the same brand can outsell a bad one by about four times, even given the same media expenditure. Therefore, at the very least, we should think of ad evaluation as a risk-reduction exercise! We discuss how to formally evaluate one’s ad, first in situ, when we assess the ad in a strict experimental control condition, and then in vivo, when we track the effectiveness of the ad in the field. But before either of these, a marcoms manager can systematically judge (guided by theory) whether the ad is easy to understand, whether the ad elicits the right brand and associations, and finally, whether it is persuasive. We will discuss how to do this, including assessing the ROI of ad pre-testing, and the synergistic effects.

This chapter covers two topics. The first topic is direct response, a tactic designed to trigger a response by making an offer to the target audience. The aim of this section is to understand how to conduct a good direct response marketing campaign. We will also discuss the various methods for delivering an offer, and if applied carefully, direct response marketing can build brand equity. The second topic is sales promotion. Like direct response marketing, the objective of sales promotion is to trigger an immediate response, but this time with sales at both trade and consumer levels. This chapter will discuss the various types of trade and consumer promotion and examine how promotions can be negatively or positively oriented. It ends by suggesting some clever uses for consumer promotion.

It is sometimes easy to forget that many brands are also the names of the companies, like the banks or airlines and even departmental stores. This means very often when things go wrong – like an aeroplane crash, or a product recall – the reputation of the whole company takes a trashing. This chapter is all about building and protecting a reputation. In the age of social media, one’s reputation can be quickly destroyed, and advertising may not be effective in combating this. It is therefore important for a marcoms manager to learn other communication tools that may be more effective. The first part of this chapter will discuss public relations, corporate and advocacy advertising, sponsorship, corporate social responsibility, brand purpose advertising, native advertising and content marketing. We conclude with a model suggesting how integration can be achieved to enhance a firm’s reputation.

This chapter examines the effective use of research to assist in the creative development of marketing communications. By this, we do not mean dry quantitative statistics (although this too can yield insights) but rather a thorough understanding of the thoughts, feelings and relationship of the target audience with the brand or category. In this chapter, we assume that qualitative research, when conducted well, will yield workable insights but, when conducted badly, will yield misleading results that lead to disastrous outcomes. The ability to uncover workable insights is an important skill to develop so we will focus on how to achieve this competence.