Academic Marketing Circles

When this IMC concept was first developed in academic marketing circles, it focused on “not putting your eggs all in one basket”.  It meant if you do television advertising, make sure you also use another medium, like print and/or audio.  The theory was that people become aware, interested and will take action if you reach them through different senses.  The choice is yours which combination to pick, but the key is that the message is consistent. The idea is that the billboard or direct mail or print ad in a magazine should support your streaming or pop up or television or radio ads.  Consistency and continuity are the keys to success.

You have been assigned to read Chapters 1  PROMO 2 textbook.  You have read about Brands and Positioning and Segmenting and the vastness of Internet communication possibilities.  With that as a background, re-read the first two pages of Chapter 1 in your PROMO 2 textbook.  Things are different today, right?  Consumers seek the information they want in a variety of ways.  They don’t just sit back and wait for information that companies decide to send them.  They are exposed to that, but mostly they go seek it.

Assignment Instructions: Answer thoughtfully and thoroughly. In two pages, single-spaced, your team should collectively recreate your version of paragraph one in Chapter 1 of the textbook.  That means describe products and services that interest everyone on your team.  Now write a story about the many marketing communications, ads, blogs, influencers that find you, and you actually seek yourselves.

Use a combination of current products and your own real-life examples as analogies to explain your understanding of IMC.   Be specific.   What do you as the targeted customer want or need?  How do companies go about getting that information to you in this digital age? How do you go about finding the pre-buying information you need in this digital age?  Also, reflect on the ads and texts and intrusions into your life that you get about products and services that have absolutely no interest to you (at least right now at this stage of your life).

Make sure every member of your team contributes to all this.  You can each do a story of your own personal experiences with IMC if you want to approach it that way.  But then make sure you have an Introduction paragraph explaining that, and then a Conclusion paragraph that ties it all together and reflects on the similarities (and the differences if they exist) of each student’s experience.