The aim of this chapter is to give the reader a better understanding of the principles of influence in personal selling. Personal selling is especially important for high-involvement purchases. The chapter outlines the steps involved with special emphasis paid to effective presentation and handling of objections, including multi-attribute reframing, selling the ‘improved value’ and selling the ‘vision’. Also discussed in this chapter are the subtle, yet powerful principles of compliance seeking tactics. For long-term success, though, a sales agent needs to be trustworthy, and we discuss the factors that make a sales agent more trustworthy. We then present a model that summarises the many paths that lead to effective persuasion.

Humans are social animals: we influence and are influenced by each other. Traditional models of marketing communications do not place much weight on social influence, but with the rise of social media and social commerce, companies are beginning to take this form of communication seriously. This chapter presents a way of thinking about IMC that incorporates these modern communication methods and the broader principle of social influence. The chapter starts by providing some context: it outlines how information flows and introduces some basic principles that govern behaviour in social networks. It then delves into the more substantial issues: what social media is, what its four core characteristics are, and how organisations have exploited these. This is followed by a close examination of certain types of social communication, such as WOM, buzz and viral marketing. The emphasis throughout the chapter is on understanding the preconditions necessary for what we call ‘viral contagion’ to occur. This leads to a discussion of social commerce.

This chapter and chapter 6 are about advertising, which is a paid form of communication by a sponsor. The aim of this chapter is to give the reader a better understanding of creativity and its importance to advertising. Although advertising is only one marcoms tool, it is the most important tool for brand (re)positioning. However, for advertising to be effective, it must possess the creative power to cut through the noise and clutter. The chapter explores the importance of advertising creativity and sets out how to get it right. This is a complex area because our processing of a creative ad can be completely hijacked by unintended associations, which are not uncommon when we attempt anything original. To minimise this, a marcoms manager needs to understand the theory of advertising creativity, as well as how to nurture the emergence of the creative idea, which must be guided by a creative strategy summarised in a creative brief.

In chapter 6, we discussed what an advertising creative idea is and how to increase the probability of finding the big idea. But what happens after that? Ideally, we should pre-test the idea (see chapter 12). But to do so, we need to first create the ad, sometimes called ‘execution’. Things can still go wrong if the creative idea is not well executed, no matter how good it is. For instance, if the copy is difficult to comprehend, the humour is irrelevant, or the celebrity chosen does not fit the brand and so on. The aim of this chapter is to discuss how executional tactics can be used effectively. The discussion centres on what creative execution means and explains the difference between creative execution and the creative idea, stressing that executions must be guided by the creative idea. Under some circumstances, the creative execution is also the creative idea. We will also discuss different types of executional tactics and how to use them properly.

In the past decade, the media landscape has changed dramatically affecting how marcoms are implemented. The media has become fragmented and is increasingly digitised. Consumers can now instantly access brand information from multiple websites using multiple devices, and this is not counting the rise of social media. The job of a marcoms manager has become extremely complex. But here is the good news: it also means greater creative possibilities. The objective of this chapter is to help a marcoms manager negotiate this complexity. To this end, the marcoms manager should understand the strengths and weaknesses of different communication channels and be guided by a set of principles.

This chapter is about media planning and budgeting in advertising. Many industries spend as much as one-third of their profit (not revenue) on media and promotions. A media plan that is not well thought out and executed will affect the company’s bottom line very quickly. Although this chapter is principally about media planning and budgeting, it is also about communication objectives and consumer behaviour. If we do not understand where and when consumers buy our product or service, we will not be able to place and time our advertisement to best influence them as well. If we understand these, then we can decide on the most cost-effective channel, the best time and the ideal frequency to reach them with the right media vehicles. Factoring into this decision is whether the organisation wants to grow. If so, then being able to reach as many consumers as possible becomes important aided by having distinctive creative assets and excess share of voice. Each of these decisions has implications for the budget and so media planning and budgeting is quite a complex exercise. And this complexity is compounded as more online channels and platforms become available, although the advent of programmatic media buying improves the efficiency of ad placements, notwithstanding its weaknesses.

This chapter is about evaluating the effectiveness of an ad and the subsequent campaign. This is an important chapter because a bad ad can hurt a brand even with a single exposure, and a good ad of the same brand can outsell a bad one by about four times, even given the same media expenditure. Therefore, at the very least, we should think of ad evaluation as a risk-reduction exercise! We discuss how to formally evaluate one’s ad, first in situ, when we assess the ad in a strict experimental control condition, and then in vivo, when we track the effectiveness of the ad in the field. But before either of these, a marcoms manager can systematically judge (guided by theory) whether the ad is easy to understand, whether the ad elicits the right brand and associations, and finally, whether it is persuasive. We will discuss how to do this, including assessing the ROI of ad pre-testing, and the synergistic effects.

This chapter covers two topics. The first topic is direct response, a tactic designed to trigger a response by making an offer to the target audience. The aim of this section is to understand how to conduct a good direct response marketing campaign. We will also discuss the various methods for delivering an offer, and if applied carefully, direct response marketing can build brand equity. The second topic is sales promotion. Like direct response marketing, the objective of sales promotion is to trigger an immediate response, but this time with sales at both trade and consumer levels. This chapter will discuss the various types of trade and consumer promotion and examine how promotions can be negatively or positively oriented. It ends by suggesting some clever uses for consumer promotion.

It is sometimes easy to forget that many brands are also the names of the companies, like the banks or airlines and even departmental stores. This means very often when things go wrong – like an aeroplane crash, or a product recall – the reputation of the whole company takes a trashing. This chapter is all about building and protecting a reputation. In the age of social media, one’s reputation can be quickly destroyed, and advertising may not be effective in combating this. It is therefore important for a marcoms manager to learn other communication tools that may be more effective. The first part of this chapter will discuss public relations, corporate and advocacy advertising, sponsorship, corporate social responsibility, brand purpose advertising, native advertising and content marketing. We conclude with a model suggesting how integration can be achieved to enhance a firm’s reputation.

This chapter examines the effective use of research to assist in the creative development of marketing communications. By this, we do not mean dry quantitative statistics (although this too can yield insights) but rather a thorough understanding of the thoughts, feelings and relationship of the target audience with the brand or category. In this chapter, we assume that qualitative research, when conducted well, will yield workable insights but, when conducted badly, will yield misleading results that lead to disastrous outcomes. The ability to uncover workable insights is an important skill to develop so we will focus on how to achieve this competence.