Integrated Marketing Communications Plan
Needs to identify a real organisation and product to promote. You must then complete an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Plan for that organisation.
Depending on the company you choose, you may have access to extensive information such as the company's marketing strategy through the company website and, possibly, annual reports and accounts. You may need to make assumptions, but these should be based on full and sensible analysis of existing material such as advertising campaigns, case studies, journal articles and other media coverage.
You must demonstrate a high level of analytical skills and sound interpretation to justify your suggestions. You are expected to research widely to obtain information, however you must not "cold call" organisations indiscriminately. It is best to make full use of secondary information that is available to the public either via the company's website or PR department or databases. If you have personal contacts in companies you may use them. Students who do not have any business contacts will not be disadvantaged. Use of secondary data is quite adequate to gain an excellent grade for this project. Most marks will be allocated for good analytical skills, sound decisions and appropriate recommendations.
Guidance for Assignment
The following points need to be considered when developing your promotional campaign:
1. You need to understand who your target segment is. You should develop a profile of the typical member(s) of the segment(s). This will help for example, to determine which media you should use. What is the positioning strategy for this product? What marketing objectives are there for this product?
2. You should have clear communication and sales based objectives in mind that support the above marketing objectives for each of the forms of marketing communications you use. For example, a typical objective might be - to have awareness of by our target segment of our brand of 90% using advertising in order to generate sales that will lead to our market share marketing objective of 25%.
3. The IMC campaignis of 12 months duration.You need to allocate the budget for both the creative strategy and media strategy.
4. For your creative strategyyou willneed to consider the following issues for each of the elements of the marketing communications mix that you will use:
- Message theme and strategy
- Message appeals and execution styles
- Taglines
- Sources or spokesperson used (if needed
- Please develop a print ad and place in an appendix.)
5. For your media strategy you will need to determine which specific media you will use, the scheduling (see sample media schedule) and so on. For example, for TV you should refer to the OzTam website to ratings for various channels and/or TV programs.
6. You should develop and justify a budget to implement both your creative and media strategies.