[MUSIC] At the first lecture of the course, we have defined integrated marketing communications as the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools within a company into a seamless program which maximizes impact of the value proposition on consumers at a minimal cost. We have covered many theories, tactics, tools that we can use in planning and execution of our market and communications. We have talked about different objectives we might have while communicating with our consumers and how we should be tailoring our communications according to these objectives. In a typical marketing communications campaign, we have some specific questions that help us while preparing our campaign. To whom do we address our communications? What is the objective of the communications? What are the specific points to be communicated? Which vehicles should we use to convey our message? What is the budget we need to allocate for our campaign? How will we assess the impact of our communications campaign? Before we start any marketing communications campaign, we need to establish objectives, targets, and standards so the progress with respect to the target can be monitored during and after the campaign. Continued monitoring of performance against predetermined targets is essential in achieving effective and efficient integrated marketing communications. For example, if an objective is to increase brand awareness by 10% by the 31st of December in 2006, we can examine after the date to see whether the target has been met. Because awareness is not observable in the normal course of business activities, we may use a survey as an appropriate assessment tool to conduct our research. The means we choose to evaluate the effectiveness of our communications is critical. For example, evaluating our marketing communications activities with a before and after comparison of sales results might be unreliable because of the dynamic nature of the market. The effectiveness of our communications campaign may be misjudged negatively if we ignore the fact that a major competitor introduced a new product and supported it with a significant sales promotion. Or our price discount activity may appear extremely effective during an economic crisis due to the increased price sensitivity of the consumers because of the crisis. Additionally regardless of how powerful and persuasive our ad is, most of the people we are communicating with will not need with what they're selling at that specific moment. However if we can manage to establish a deep enough impression on them, they will remember our brand when they actually need to make a purchase. We need to measure the effectiveness of our campaign against our primary communications objective. It's important to do it in a timely manner so that we can adjust and optimize our performance during the campaign. We measure our performance first within platforms to assess whether we have achieved our target for that specific platform. For example, for an online campaign, did we achieve our objectives in terms of click-through rates, dwelling time or conversion rates? Then we measure our performance across platforms for an integrated view of the campaign. Depending on the objectives of our campaign you may choose different key performance indicators such as consumer loyalty, brand awareness, brand equity, customer engagement, advertising likability, advertising recall, consumer attitudes, number of email subscriptions, blog comments, tweets, likes and so on. The match between the objectives and the chosen performance criteria is important. Additionally, sometimes multiple analysis can be done for different performance indicators. In order to have a more complete picture, I would recommend to work with multiple metrics and measure those metrics before and after the campaign to observe the direction and the magnitude of the change. We may also evaluate our communications more qualitatively. For example, we may evaluate the message and the physical design of a communications piece. Assessment of the physical design actually involves evaluation of the cognitive and affective elements, executional frameworks and advertising appeals used to communicate the message. Message evaluation can be done at any stage of the development process, and attempt to measure the quality and impact of an advertisement or a promotion. One way to evaluate the message is copy testing. This technique is used to assess consumer evaluations when the marketing piece is finished, or in it's final stages of the development prior to production. It examines consumer reaction to the main message of the ad, as well as the format in which the message will be presented. Another message evaluation technique is advertising tracking. In this technique, consumers are shown a portion of an advertisement, or a few visuals from a TV ad without showing the brand name. It measures weather respondents recognize the advertisement and the brand. This technique allows us to measure likeability, unaided and aided brand advertisement and message recall. Recent advancements in technology provide us some new tools to measure our communication materials. For example, eye tracking is a powerful tool to objectively measure consumers attention and spontaneous responses to marketing messages. It allows us to understand how the visual information of an ad is acquired by consumers. Eye tracking technique allows us to obtain information on the visual attention by analyzing the movement of the consumer's eyes. We can examine how consumer's eye move, where they stop and what catches their attention. For example it may show that in an ad with a model 75% of the consumers look at the model's face, but only 12% look at the brand's name. Knowing how consumers actually examine an advertisement helps us optimize the design of our ads. Eye tracking studies use a video camera or a sensor to pick up light reflected from the eye to extract information on eye rotation and judge how the gaze falls on the stimuli. This technique also allows us to see the sequence of observation of the message by consumers. Cognitive Neuroscience is a brain measurement process that tracks brain activity. It allows us to observe how the brain is physiologically affected by advertising and marketing strategies. This technique unveils subconscious biases of consumers which could not be figured out by self report studies. Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscientific methods to analyze and understand human behavior in relation to marketing information. It helps us understands which products and aspects of marketing offer or a communications material are more preferred. It also indicated when consumers merely focus on a logo or an attractive woman in the commercial. It identifies positive and negative emotions and the intensity of the emotions by the amount of neurons firing. We see that many tools are at our disposal at every stage of integrated marketing communications campaigns. We need to make sure that the tools, the metrics we choose to assist our campaigns are relevant to our predetermined objectives and the characteristics of our campaign. [MUSIC]
