Reference no: EM132476754

Integrated Marketing Communications Plan

Purpose: To assist students to prepare a practical integrated marketing communication plan for a brand through the application of material presented in the course

Brand Name - Starcbucks

Part 1. Executive Summary
Your report needs to include an executive summary. This should be a comprehensive one-page (max) précis of your group's IMC plan - it should highlight the key elements (major details) of your report and be personalised for a non-marketing audience. It should not include marketing jargon or minutiae detail.

STAGE 1 (Campaign Planning)

Stage 1 of the IMC plan details the research, analysis and key strategic decisions undertaken in preparing your group's Integrated Communication Brief (creative brief).

Part 2. Current Situation Analysis

Perform a thorough analysis of the situation confronting the brand, internally and externally. The purpose of this is for you to get clarity around the marketing problem or opportunity to be addressed by the IMC plan.

The situational analysis provides an overview of the IMC functions and an assessment of the environment in which IMC professionals must work. Several factors must be considered in the situational analysis. The company for which the IMC plan is being created must be analysed. The environment in which this company operates must be understood and detailed. A market and consumer behaviour analysis must be completed. Further, you must understand the competitive landscape. Please note: groups may need to make assumptions where data is unavailable. However, you must make an effort to track down information using more than just Google, corporate websites and Wikipedia.

Background Research and Analysis

Groups need to undertake a thorough analysis of the situation confronting their brand (item), internally and externally. No data and or statistics should be included in your report without clear considered analysis (adequate insight) and explanation into the implication of that data and statistics. Importantly - groups need to draw conclusions. Your internal research & analysis should include all relevant strengths and weaknesses and your external research & analysis needs to incorporate all opportunities and threats.

Internal Research & Analysis
The internal analysis incorporates research and assesses relevant areas involving the brand / service offering and the company itself. The capabilities of the company and its ability to develop and implement a successful IMC programme, the organisation of the IMC department, and the successes and failures of past programmes should be considered.

Another aspect of the internal analysis revolves around undertaking research from which an assessment of the company or brand from an image perspective. Often, the image the company or brand brings to the market will have a significant impact on its IMC programme.

Other issues to consider include: sales and profitability, mission and vision, organisation's orientation (e.g., risk-taking vs. conservative), finances, technology, human resources, market share, and sales trends. (Ferrell & Hartline 2011) Also consider asking questions such as: "What is the company's culture like? How ambitious is the company? How much risk is it willing to incur? What is the state of the company's financial, technological and managerial resources? What are the recent sales trends, profit trends and market share trends?" (Parente 2015)
From this research and exploration, you should be able to derive the key strengths and weaknesses for inclusion in section 2.2 SWOT Analysis.

External Research & Analysis
The environment in which a company operates must be understood and detailed. Existing market and consumer behaviour analysis must be completed. Further, you must understand the competitive landscape. Finally, a product or service history and evaluation should be included.

Integrated Marketing Communications Plan Outline

Macro Environmental Factors:
Undertake an external environmental analysis by examining the many different external factors affecting an organisation. Political Economic Socio-cultural Technological Legal Environmental Demographic. Only consider those that are directly relevant.

Competitive Analysis:
You need to know who your competition is. Further, you need to know how, why and when the competition will respond to changes in IMC tactics and executions. This analysis should examine both direct and indirect competition, with an emphasis on direct competition.

Consumer Behaviour Analysis:
You will need to complete a consumer behaviour analysis on current users. It is necessary to understand who, what, how, when, and why consumers buy / use your company's brand item.

In comparing the profile with the market that exists in aggregate, you may also find some market opportunities for growth. In this section, you should provide detailed analysis of the potential consumer(s) using demographics, psychographics, geodemographics and behaviouristics [brand loyalty]. Consider the CPM and HEM models.

Current Brand Item Evaluation:
Examine the existing marketing mix (product, price, distribution and promotion) of your brand item. You need to consider:
• Brand item quality;
• The benefits offered by the brand item and the needs and wants it satisfies;
• Has the company developed new markets, or found new applications or uses for its brand item?
• How do channel intermediaries feel about the brand item?
• Is distribution effective?
• Is the brand name well known?
• What problems do consumers see with the brand item?
• What are the brand item's unique benefits or features?
• How does the company differentiate its brand item from its competitors?
• How do consumers perceive the brand item? (Baskin 2010)
From this research and investigation, you should be able to derive the key opportunities and threats for inclusion in section 2.2 SWOT Analysis.

SWOT Analysis
Groups are required to create a table or bullet point list of key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats. This should not contain any issue / insight that cannot be traced back to section 2.1.

Key Marketing Problem or Opportunity
Overview of the key problem your campaign aims to solve and/or key opportunity it will address.
Importantly, in many cases, an IMC campaign cannot solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. There are things that a well-run IMC campaign can do and things that it cannot do. In the event that your selected marketing problem requires more than a new IMC campaign, you will also need to make changes to some, or all of the other elements of the marketing mix before addressing Key Strategic Decisions.
Any changes to the existing marketing mix need to be detailed in this section: i.e. new packaging, new distribution, new flavour / ingredients, premium pricing, line extension etc. It is strongly recommended however that this being an IMC plan you focus clearly on the main objectives inherent in this.

Integrated Marketing Communications Plan Outline

3. Key Strategic Decisions
Marketing Objectives
Sales, market share, profit etc. (need to be SMART - measurable, achievable, realistic and over a specific timeframe).
Communication Objectives
Campaign communication objectives include: category need, brand awareness, brand image / attitude / preference, brand purchase / action intention. Please note: brand awareness and brand image / attitude / preference are almost always communication objectives (need to be SMART - measurable, achievable, realistic and over a specific timeframe).
• Category Need - Establishing a product category to remove or satisfy a perceived discrepancy between a current motivational state and a desired motivational state.
• Brand Awareness - Fostering the consumer's ability to recognise or recall the brand within the category, in sufficient detail to make a purchase. Recognition is easier to achieve than recall. Brand recall is important outside the store; brand recognition is important inside the store.
• Brand Attitude (brand image) - Helping consumers evaluate the brand's perceived ability to meet a currently relevant need. Relevant brand needs may be negatively or positively oriented).
• Brand Purchase Intention - Moving consumers to decide to purchase the brand or take purchase- related action.
Positioning

Clear articulation of where your group plans to position its brand item in customers' minds. If your group is planning to reposition and or has line extended its original brand item, clear justification must be provided.
No company can be successful if its products resemble every other product. Strategically, each brand item must represent the right kinds of things in the minds of the target market. Positioning requires that marketers define and communicate similarities and differences between their brand and their competitors.
Positioning requires: (1) determining a frame of reference by identifying the target market and relevant competition, (2) identifying the optimal points of parity and points of difference brand associations given that frame of reference (consider a perceptual/positioning map), and (3) creating a positioning statement to summarise the positioning and essence of the brand.
Campaign Target Audience
Groups must define their (primary) campaign target audience initially by brand loyalty (behaviour), and then delineate it further using more traditional bases/characteristics. The incorporation of a behavioural sequence model (BSM) is recommended in this section.
Identifying the target audience for a campaign starts with looking at potential buyers of the brand item, current users, deciders, or influencers, and individuals, groups, particular publics, or the general public.
The target audience is a critical influence on the communicator's decisions about what to say, how, when, where, and to whom. You need to first look at the target audience in terms of usage / brand loyalty (Behavioural Segmentation):
• Is the target new to the category or current user?
• Is the target loyal to the brand, loyal to a competitor, or someone who switches between brands?
• If a brand user, is he or she a heavy or light user?
• In behavioural segmentation, buyers are divided into groups on the basis of their knowledge of, attitude toward, use of, or response to a brand item.
• Your strategy sections in stage two of the IMC Plan will differ depending on the answers to these questions. Your target audience can be further delineated using the major segmentation variables of: geographic, demographic and psychographic segmentation.

Campaign Budget

You need to develop your Campaign Budget using at least one of the four budgeting methods discussed in the lecture series. These include: the objective-and-task method, the percentage-of- sales method, the competitive-parity method and the affordability method. Budgets based on the affordability method alone will be deemed unacceptable.

Brand Personality / Character
This is a description of the personality and character your brand should consistently portray. People have relationships with brands just as they do with people. That's why marketers define the brand personality carefully. Some brands have subtle, and often unconscious, relationships with customers. A brand's personality has those human personality traits. What kind of person would the brand be if it were human?

4.0 Integrated Communication Brief (creative brief)

You need to use the insight and key strategic decisions from stage 1 of the IMC plan to prepare your Integrated Communication (creative) Brief.
When completing integrated communication (creative) briefs, it is important that you distil your detailed research, analysis and key strategic decisions, into a clear, concise, insightful and inspirational document. As such, groups should not include all the client related deliberations. If an agency wants more insight, it can request it.
The creative brief is due to be completed and submitted approximately midway through the semester (the exact date will be advised by your local lecturer). The brief is worth 15% of the marks in this course. Remember you have been provided a brief template to use for this.

Top Tips for Top Briefs
• Your briefing template is a useful tool; learn how to use it.
• Define the problem clearly.
• Inform and inspire.
• Aim to surprise and challenge preconceptions.
• Be clear and single-minded.
• Make sure it hangs together as a coherent whole.
• Clearly define the role for each media channel or activity. (Baskin 2010)

Campaign Strategy and Implementation

Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy
For the IMC plan, it is essential that the work you submit demonstrates adherence to the Integrated Communication (creative) brief already submitted.

You will be assessed on how this strategy is executed across media choices and planning, how the plan is to be monitored and evaluated and how well the central concept to your IMC strategy adheres to the key positioning of your brand, including target audience(s) selected and justified.

While these specific elements will be considered, it is important to note that your work, being a practical plan (and brief) will need to be fully integrated and demonstrate synergy, fluency and structure.

Provide mock-ups of / storyboards for advertisements, radio scripts, QR Codes, schedules, press releases, mock-ups of product placement, mock-ups of social media, media schedules, etc. used in your IMC plan.

Your plan must be realistic, well thought out and demonstrate suitable creativity to achieve the objectives specified. A copy of the Integrated Communication (creative) brief done earlier in the course is to be attached as an appendix to your completed IMC plan.
The plan needs to contain:

Creative Strategy

Groups must include a clear introduction or preamble to their creative strategy. You must demonstrate that you have understood the key elements of the brief and that their creative idea that follows has been clearly brainstormed and executed around achieving briefed requirements.

Communications effectiveness depends on how a message is being expressed, as well as on its content. If a communication is ineffective, it may mean the wrong message was used, or the right one was poorly expressed. Creative strategies are the way marketers translate their messages into a specific communication.

Development of Creative idea

A clear platformable creative idea needs to be brainstormed, thoroughly developed and described. Start with the brief and consider using any approach outlined in your marketing communication studies.

A Key Creative Idea [needs to thoroughly described and developed around the key benefit claim/brand proposition] usually uses one of the creative strategies noted in the textbook and lecture series. Brainstorm the creative idea from the key creative brief insight and direction.
Make sure you take into consideration the components of Brand Awareness & Brand Image / Attitude. You also need to demonstrate an understanding of persuasion and the Elaboration Likelihood Model from your text. This knowledge / understanding needs to be incorporated into the execution of outdoor mock-ups, TV storyboards, radio scripts, social media, blogs, video etc. for traditional media and new media.
Detailed Explanation and Mock-ups (Tangible Executions) across all Media

Groups need to include detailed explanation and tangible mock-ups for all traditional media and new media selected for the IMC Campaign in this section. It is important to apply theory. Groups must show tangible integration of their platformable creative idea across relevant multiple traditional and new media. This should include detailed explanation and tangible mock-ups for at least two traditional and two new media.

Attachment:- Integrated Marketing Communications Plan.rar