Marketing Communications [antikvár]

FOREWORD Marketing conununications must become more integrated! Whether you are a businessperson determined to obtain the maximum effectiveness from a hmited promotional budget or a student coming to grips with all the different promotional elements in a marketing mix, it is important to make sense of the total process. It will only be possible to do so if marketing commimications is seen as an integrated process. Although the logic of an integrated approach is obvious, it is not easy to achieve either theoretically or practically. Despite this inherent difficulty, Paul Smith's book demonstrates the potential of an integrated approach to marketing commucations. Advertising has dominated much of promotional thinking and teaching, partly because it is the promotional form which is most obvious to us every day, and partly because it often accounts for the largest proportion of the promotional budget. Increasingly, however, below the line activities have become more important. Sales promotions have a vigorous role to play; direct marketing has grown strongly and public relations has become increasingly a separate discipline with its own agencies and its own academic courses. Internal marketing, the art of persuading an organisation's own employees to adopt a marketing orientation, is still in its infancy. All these separate elements must be integrated together. However, the academic world has not yet provided a sufficiently strong theoretical framework either to support a totally integrated approach to the study of marketing communications, or to assist practitioners in making sound decisions on the division of the promotional budget. This is not to underestimate the valuable work already carried out in the field of consumer behaviour and organisational behaviour which rightly underpins promotional decisions. The words 'marketing communications' are themselves neither well known nor well understood. The number of people with the title 'Marketing Communications Manager', although growing, is still very limited. In my experience in Britain, it is academics who are more comfortable with the term but I understand that in America 'marketing communications' is a preferred term among marketing practitioners. Whatever the exact sihiation, the lack of clarity only adds weight to my proposition that marketing communications must become more integrated and better understood academically and in business. By integrated I mean that all the various elements of promotion devoted to informing, persuading or inducing action, from a range of target audiences, must be studied, analysed, planned and implemented in a coordinated and effective manner. This is an extremely difficult process. It presupposes that all the elements are individually understood and that their effects can reasonably be predicted. At last we have a text by a European author which provides a comprehensive framework to enable the reader to better understand the individual contribution and the collective combination of each of the elements of the mix, including the important personal selling element. In my role as Senior Examiner of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, in Marketing Communications, I intend to encourage this integrated approach. I am also adopting (¦ 1. I ' » iV }' ' I, <;/!''