Marketing Communications Table of Contents

Promotion Strategy: Positioning

Positioning: Three Steps

1. Define frames of reference
   • Identify relevant competition
   • Target market
2. Assess Brand Perceptions
   • Own Brand
   • Competing Brands
3. Determine desired brand position
   • Points-of-parity associations
   • Points-of-difference associations

Positioning statement template:

Campaign Positioning

• Must be fully consistent with overall brand positioning
• Address how, specifically, are approaching the communication of the brand positioning 

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

• It's what you're going to be

• “The major selling idea should emerge as the strongest singular thing you can say about your product or service. This should be the claim with the broadest and most meaningful appeal to your target…be certain you can live with it; be sure it stands strong enough to remain the central issue in every ad and commercial in the campaign”

Promotion Strategy: Segmenting & Targeting

Segmentation

Identify smaller, homogeneous groups of customers who have common needs and similar responses to marketing.

Targeting

Pick amongst those segments the ones to target, for value

"Big" vs. "Little" Targeting

• "Big Targeting" = Who are the customers for our company?
• "Little Targeting" = Who are the customers for our brand or product?

Customer Lifetime Value

Use LTV to find out which customers to invest more in

User types for segmenting & targeting

Identify user types for segmenting and targeting (i.e. non users, tried & rejected, never tried)

Brand Development Index (BDI) and Category Development Index (CDI)

Always do both a BDI and CDI calculation in order to compare the two.  The BDI answers how well our brand performs within a segment instead of in the population overall.  The CDI answers how well our product category does within a specific group of customers (segment).

Sample Indixes Excercise:

Readings

Core brand message: How to build a unique brand

Three Questions You Need to Ask About Your Brand

Branding in the Digital Age

Customer Decision Journey

• Understand your customers' decision journey
• Determine which touch points are priorities (figure out how to leverage those)
• Allocate resources accordingly

• The goal of conceptualizing the consumer decision journey is to consider all the points of interaction and to understand which are most important in influencing the consumer
  • Be sure all the important touch points create a consistent brand concept

4 Steps of Building the Brand

1. Ensure identification of the brand and association in customers’ minds with a certain product/customer need

2. Establish consumer relevant brand meaning by strategically linking consistent, tangible and intangible associations

3. Elicit the desired responses to the brand identification and brand meaning

4. Convert response to active, loyal relationship between customers & brand

Integrated Marketing Communication

• Evaluate which tools to invest in - by looking at your customer, their journey and where they are in the process
• Don't do everything (avoid a scattershot approach)
• Get the best variety you can
• Get clarity and consistency across those disciplines to get the maximum impact

Key takeaway

Attract the right people.  Have a specific target.

Readings

Branding in the Digital Age

Toward a Compelling Customer Touchpoint Architecture

Reebok Case

Branding & ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth)

What is marketing?

Segmentation, targeting and positioning are the cornerstones of marketing.

4Ps and 5Cs make up the marketing mix

Product, Price, Place, and Promotion

Consumer, Competitor, Company, Collaborator and Context

What is a brand?

• A promise and a commitment to customers
• What customers believe it to be
• A name, trademark, symbol or design.

Consumer-based Brand Equity (CBBE)

• What's in the customer's head
• Differential effect: people respond differently because of what they know about the brand
• Brand awareness vs. brand associations

Customer Decision-Making Process

• Hierarchy of effects
• "ZMOT" = zero moment of truth.  Refers to the moment when a customer/user interacts with a brand, product or service to form or change an impression about that particular brand, product or service

Brand Awareness

The ability of potential buyers to recognize or recall that a brand is a member of a certain product category.

Brand Associations

The concepts that a potential customer has linked in memory to a brand.  The things that come to mind in connection to a brand.

Consistency is important in terms of the core things we want people to know about our brand.

Key takeway

Marcom (marketing communiction) addresses consumers in terms of where they are in the decision-making process and reaches them at that point.

Readings

World Wide Ad Spending (2017)