Developing an Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy - Essay Example

Developing an Integrated Marketing Communication Strategy for Selfridges Departmental Introduction Developing an integrated marketing communication strategy involves a lot of activities that mainly focus on understanding the company. This will entail an in-depth understanding of company vales and ethics, history of performance, past and present trends in marketing channels, consumer behaviour, target customer for new products and industrial competition is critical in establishing a sound integrated marketing communication strategy. This paper will focus on developing an integrated marketing communication strategy for Selfridges, a departmental store located in London, United Kingdom. The objectives of the marketing strategy will include: increasing awareness of the products and brand visibility, increasing company sales and customer base, enlarging the marketing channels and integrating the marketing content to convey a similar message that focuses on product quality and excellent customer shopping experience ad service (Low & George, 2000). These objectives will be achieved by launching a comprehensive marketing campaign that will focus on several marketing channels. These channels include offline, online, mobile and social media marketing strategies. The research will focus on important aspects of developing a smart marketing communication strategy such as consumer behaviour, how the stores determine their target customers and how they vary their marketing mix to suit different market segments and clients (Hutton & James, 2006). Steps involved in integrated marketing communication strategy will be outlined. Included also is the advantages of integrated marketing communication strategy to the departmental store. The paper seeks to assert that integrated marketing communication strategy, can provide a company with a competitive advantage and steer it to greater growth and success. Back ground of Selfridge Departmental Stores The department store is also called Selfridge & Co. It is a chain of high end departmental stores that was founded by Gordon Harry Selfridge. The basis of the stores success is the innovative marketing strategies that has been used over time. For example, at the initial stages, Gordon used creativity to making shopping adventurous by putting merchandise on display so that customers would be attracted to the departmental stores. He put highly profitable items at the front end so that customers could easily see them. He made policies that made it easy and safe for customers to shop. These techniques have been developed by other departmental stores worldwide. The stores have a slogan that says that the customer is always right. The company has successfully launched profitable advertising campaigns based on this slogan (Gould & Stephen, 2000). Following their good customer focus and creative marketing strategy, the stores are very popular and register high profits year after year. Selfridge target market include men and women aged 25 year and above. They target people with higher income and operate in the high end market. The high end consumers targeted are those that show interest in fashion, art, style and luxury. For example, the stores target business people who value a high lifestyle and don’t mind spending much money to buy items that display their wealthy and affluent lifestyle. They also target fashion enthusiasts and celebrities such as actors and musicians because they live a high life and their work demand that they remain fashionable and embrace art and creativity (Low & George, 2000). The stores face strong industrial competition from major competitors such as House of Fraser, Harrods and specialist departmental stores. These stores make their own brands, and offer stiff competition to Selfridge since it doesn’t manufacture its own brand. The potential market for the stores include developing new local brands that are specifically identified with the stores rather than sell other manufacturers brands. The stores should also target middle income customers. Most of the UK population is in the middle income class. Targeting this group will greatly improve the company’s sales and increase its market share in UK and globally. Selfridges are known for providing quality goods and services across all their departments’ locations. The stores never compromise on quality, a factor that has made them survive and thrive in the high end market. The stores are popular for their high quality architecture and windows. Selfridges are known for their innovative and excellent architecture, which forms a great tourist attraction. The great architecture draws customers in bulk to the stores. As they admire the artful architecture, they get to learn about their products and locations where they can get the goods a later date. In addition, Selfridge’s windows are also synonymous to the great brand. The windows are uniquely designed to provide protection and aesthetic windows that attract people to the stores. The stores have had several controversies and challenges such as industrial competition and price wars with other departmental wars, poor economic status and political wrangles in the countries it has presence. However, focus on customer needs and superior marketing strategies enable it overcome all challenges and increase its growth (Low & George, 2000). An analysis of the current Marketing Strategy The current marketing strategy has registered tremendous success for the stores due to its key strengths that are difficult to compete with. However, the strategy has its own shortcomings that necessitate a better plan and strategy to increase the company’s market share and secure more major positions in the competitive industry. The company has a strong brand that is attractive to young people who love and embrace fashion and art opening. Many young people identify with the brand because it provides them with fashionable clothing and Art promptly. An analysis of the marketing strategy revealed that the stores are very creative in providing high end fashion clothes and accessories to young people and thus very popular with this group (Stewart & David, 2006). The company also practice stratified branding, where different brands that fit different people are customized for the respective groups. The concept of stratified branding sets the stores apart as a leading brand in addressing customer needs by customizing products. The weaknesses in branding includes lack of their own fashion brand. Moreover, some brands such as Primark are not consistent with Selfridge’s image. The analysis revealed that the store environment and atmosphere was a major attraction to current and potential customers. Selfridge leveraged on providing a good environment that makes customers relax as they shop. The stores provide a relaxed tranquil atmosphere with adequate lighting and spacious areas. The atmosphere gives customers a shopping experience that they can’t get from competing stores. The stores provide classified layout and seasonal products. Classified layouts make it easier for customers to quickly pick items of interest. Seasonal merchandise provided ensures that customers stay comfortable and fulfil their needs at all seasons (Thorson & Esther, 2000). The weakness of the store environment is majorly lack of sufficient fitting rooms and mirrors. Consequently, customers’ time is wasted as they have to wait in line to share fitting rooms. Selfridge offers one stop shopping experience as it has cafes, restaurants, spas and make-up parlours. This increases customers shopping experience, increase convenience and save time. Therefore, customers are drawn to Selfridge stores because they can do all their shopping under one roof. However, there are no lounges for order collection and there is an unbalanced store development in different city locations, which reduce the shopping experience. The current marketing strategy leverages on the Selfridge’s ability to maintain healthy networks across several channels such as social media, holding interactive events such as beauty projects and participating in community building projects. Healthy interaction soften the brand image and persuade the public to buy from Selfridge stores. However this interaction is insufficient to reach all consumers especially those that are rarely online or live far from the targeted community projects. Another strength is multiple channels of communication (Gorning & Matthew, 2004). The stores have multichannel methods of shopping and integrated channels that allow for click and collect services. In addition, the stores have international delivery services to facilitate purchases cross international boundaries and break geographical barriers. The weakness of purchasing channels is that orders made after 4 PM are delivered the following day. This policy hinder people from making purchases after 4pm, which leads to loss of revenue. The company should introduce round the clock shopping and delivery of purchases. The company has also invested in technology to support its marketing strategies. It has well established Wi-Fi connections and web2.0 services to facilitate online purchasing. However, the company lacks sufficient high technology devices for making orders and for making online and offline search of items in the stores. Another strength of the marketing strategy is the loyalty schemes. The loyalty programs target specific customers with high purchasing capacity and tourists. The schemes give personalised services and great benefits to the team members. The weakness of the loyalty programs is that many customers don’t know of their existence and thereby fail to enjoy their benefits. An analysis of the One Month Marketing Campaign The marketing campaign strategy is a short-term campaign aimed at increasing sales and brand visibility. The strategy will include use of multichannel marketing techniques to communicate with customers and target audience. It will use merchants who will facilitate the activities of the campaign. For example, the merchants will be required to use online and mobile marketing strategies to advertise and create awareness for their products and mention that that they are available mainly at the Selfridge stores (Duncan, 2002). The merchant will also participate in promotional activities targeted in the campaign. They will be required to make coupons displaying their products and detailing their availability at Self ridge stores. They will also be involved in making the integrated marketing message so that it reflects the value they offer to the customers. The merchants will then use this message for all marketing campaign activities at their store outlets and main business areas. This message will form a tag line for advertisements, sales promotion and online marketing activities. Offline Marketing Strategies This strategy will mainly use merchants to promote products sold at Selfridge. Merchants are more appropriate because they have a large client base other than Selfridge. They sell directly to customers, who are the target group for this short term campaign. The merchants will participate in advertisements, sales promotions and public relations. Offline marketing will form a bigger share of the marketing campaign and will be allocated a third of the total budget. The company will employ a marketing agency to help in constructing a comprehensive message that promotes the value propositions of quality and customer satisfaction. A market analysis on effectiveness of advertising revealed that the company should place a fresh advertisement fortnightly. This will increase the effectiveness of advertisements. The campaign will use famous personalities to advertise in televisions and recognisable strong media personalities to advertise in radios. The advertisements will include company contacts to facilitate consultations and making of orders offline. Merchants will be required to place advertisements in offline channels such as radios and televisions. They will consult with Selfridge and work with the marketing agency to ensure that the message they display is integrated and promotes Selfridge’s value propositions. Merchants will achieve success in advertisement if the message is customized to suit the target audience. This will require integrating marketing data so that a similar content is displayed in the advertisement media. For televisions, the message will be tailored to be brief and precise. The advertisements will include a lot of graphics that are well coordinated to send a clear message to the target audience in a way that catches their attention. The radio advertisements will include a brief but comprehensive content. The content will mention the brand name, mention its products and contact address and location of the departmental stores. The message will be repeated throughout the one month campaign period to ensure that the target audience repeated remember about the existence of Selfridge and understand its business (Hutton & James, 2006). The messages in these media will be suited to fit different consumers in the most convenient way. For example, the elderly will be more appealed by informative advertisement content while the young want more flashy hyped content. Merchants will also place advertisements in print media to promote their activities and mention their availability in Selfridge as their main shopping outlets. Advertisements will be placed in the daily newspapers once in every week. The weekly content will focus on the latest fashion trends. It will also focus on selling the value propositions for quality products and enhanced customer service and shopping experience. The advertisements will be placed in major local newspapers that are read by many people. This will ensure that the advertisement messages reaches as many target customers as possible. The content of advertisements will be brief yet comprehensive enough to sell the company’s value propositions (Gould & Stephen, 2000). Other print media that will be utilised for the integrated marketing communication strategy include consumer magazines and manufacturers’ journals especially for manufacturers who use the departmental stores to sell their products (Schultz, 2003). These magazines will reserve some pages to display Selfridge’s marketing content. The marketers will leverage on this space to mainly advertise its content and mostly use images to display its various products. The disadvantage of using these media is that they reach a narrower scope of the target audience. There is no guarantee that the target audience will read the magazines or if they do, if they will carefully go through the advertisement section that contain Selfridge’s products. Public relations is another offline marketing strategy that the campaign will leverage on. The merchants normally hold charitable and non-profit activities carried out to help communities. The campaign will identify which merchants will be holding any charitable activities in this one month period and leverage on this chance. Selfridge will then sponsor part of the charitable organizations and have its banners and notices displayed as a major sponsor for the charitable events. The media is invited to cover the charitable events though not at the company’s expense. The marketing strategy will target such free media coverage to position the brand so that it remains visible during the time the charitable events will be aired in televisions. The shortcoming of this channel is that the coverage is very brief and the target customer may miss it altogether (Walker, Beth & Olson, 2007). Therefore, the marketers ‘main challenge is to ensure that they position the brand in a way that it remains visible even with brief media coverage. Merchants will participate in promotional activities such as holding beauty contests are another way of offline marketing. During beauty contests, the company will market its brand by using its clothes for fashion shows and distributing its pamphlets to audiences during the contests. Other promotional activities include making coupons with the brand printed such as pens, T-shirts, caps and umbrellas. These promotional items will be distributed to customers who visit the stores and during the marketing campaigns Online Website Strategy An analysis of the marketing trend conducted before devising the marketing campaign showed that consumer behaviour is trending towards online marketing. The marketing Campaign will employ an IT expert to design a robust website, using the latest technology. The website will be user friendly to ensure that customers feel free to use the website and refer others to the website. The website marketing will capitalise on optimizing the search engine to increase traffic to the website. The new website will have a robust network system to avoid dysfunctions when the traffic is high. The display of good will be creative to catch attention of shoppers. The details on various items on display will be brief and concise to allow customers make purchase decisions easily (Walker, Beth & Olson, 2007. The website will also have provisions for making online payments to facilitate completion of online transactions. Some marketers will be allocated the full time job of managing the website and interact with customers online to facilitate sales and increase shoppers experience. The website marketing strategy will utilise two major online marketing strategies to reach consumers and generate revenue. The website marketing strategy will focus on creating awareness and generating sales/online leads. The plan will be achieve this by driving the maximum number of quality prospective customers to the company website through optimizing the search engine and pay per click advertising. The next step will be to convert as many visitors as possible to sales by designing the website well. These two strategies will be used to increase online traffic and convert online visits to sales by positioning the products well in the website and designing the website well to allow for easy navigation by customers (Thorson & Esther, 2000). Optimizing the search engine will ensure that customers are directed to Selfridge’s website immediately they search for the department store online. Pay per click advertising will ensure that the company only pays for advertisement expenses that have actually occurred. The online website marketing strategy will focus on maximizing the websites usefulness to the customers, to persuade them to make purchases. This will be achieved by making the website user friendly by allowing easy negotiation and ensuring that the website is continuously maintained to avoid malfunctions when traffic is high. The website should use graphics and images that are appealing to the target audience to catch their attention to the products. For example, Selfridge’s target customers are young people with high appetite fashionable clothes. The website will leverage on this by displaying colourful fashionable clothes on its front page to catch the attention of any shopper in need of current fashion trends. The website strategy will also be supported by other efforts aimed at creating awareness of the existence of the company website. The efforts include: adding the website URL to email, put the URL on business press releases and include the URL in classified advertisements (Snyder & Beth, 2001). The website will be continuously updated with current autumn-winter fashion trends to enable shoppers wear the latest fashion trends. It will also be regularly maintained to ensure that customers who visit it to make purchases are not inconvenienced by mechanical breakdown. The success of the website marketing strategy will be measured by the increase in website traffic from new customers and those wishing to make repeated purchases. The website will have a provision where customers can give their feedback on how useful they found the website. This feedback will be retrieved on a daily basis and customer recommendations will be executed to increase their online shopping experience. The redesigning of the website will kick off immediately the marketing campaign starts to allow customers to interact with the website eve before other marketing strategies that take longer are implemented. Maintenance of the website and continuous upgrading will go beyond the one month campaign into the future because consumer behaviour is increasingly leaning towards digital marketing (DeLozier & Wayne, 2006). Social Media Marketing Strategies Social media marketing strategy is increasing becoming popular with Selfridge’s target customers. The marketing campaign will maximize on this trend to increase social media advertising. For this one month campaign, the company will open social media sites and brand them with exciting posts, tags and comments on the exciting offers the company is offering for the Autumn-winter fashion collection. The company will give offers to its followers on social media especially those that post and comment on the social sites (Ogde& James, 2008). There will be quizzes and questions asked on fashion trends and knowledge of company products. Exciting prize will be given to winners. These social media quizzes will increase participation in the marketing campaign and create more awareness on company products and brand visibility. Social media sites such as Facebook, twitter, instagram and viper among others to will be used to create awareness and facilitate purchases. The strategy will aim at building an online community rather that a number of followers. Building a community will ensure that the company can follow on the things that people twit or are interested about. Using this information, the company is able to address these needs through innovative products. Building a community will ensure that followers keep up and engage with the brand. The strategy will ensure that the company stayed tuned to catch all the twits concerning its products and other customer needs. The strategy aims at increasing the company’s interaction with followers to ensure that they pay attention to its products (Thorson & Esther, 2000), For example, inserting some personality and humour into the brand will stir things on social media and draw attention to the brand. Use of humour will increase brand visibility, likes and comments. The company will therefore analyse the comments to increase its brand visibility. Conversing directly with social media followers is also part of the social media marketing strategy. The company will allocate some staff to manage its social sites. Having a conversation with followers by literally retweeting, liking and commenting on their posts and directly requesting them to interact with the company content will increase awareness of the products and induce purchases. For example, the company will create a twitter and Facebook account for the Autumn-Winter fashion trends and request its followers to like, post and make comments and recommendations (Cleland & Kim, 2005). The followers will be able to request for products through the social media and ask for them to be customized. This way, the company will increase its brand visibility, induce purchases and upgrade its marketing strategies using followers’ recommendations and comments. The strategy will also create a powerful social media movement across all social sites. The company needs to engage the followers and customers by creating social campaigns that run across all social media channels. The strategy will standout by adding inspirational, charitable and emotional touch to connect with follower with different interests. Any aspect that touches the heart strings often works well (Duncan, 2004). Therefore, the company will use personal inspirations to sell its products. For example, the campaign will use powerful stories and testimonials on social media. The company will utilise testimonials from well-known individuals who buy their clothes from Selfridge (Cornelissen, Joseph & Lock, 2000). The testimonial will focus on the shopping experience, quality of products and customer service experience. These factors are important in influencing customer to prefer one brand over another. Mobile Marketing Strategy A market analysis research shows that more than 91% of people use their devices at all times. Therefore, mobile marketing is a big opportunity for Selfridge, because most people have phones and use them 24/7. The mobile marketing strategy will focus on developing marketing applications that offer marketing information on Selfridge products. The apps will be installed on major phone brands to allow customers to access Selfridge’s fashion trends at a small transaction fee. The apps will be simple to operate and will contain images of clothing items, prices and stores where these items are available. (Drobis & David, 2008).This strategy will be very expensive to fully implement with the current marketing budget. Therefore, only simple apps will be generated initially to save on costs, and later, the apps will be upgraded to include more sophisticated features. The marketing strategy will focus on finding new mobile habits in order to get ad sustain mobile users’ attention. The strategy will achieve this by understanding that being mobile means more than having access to information, it means understanding new user habits and leveraging on them to sell company products. For mobile marketing, habits are the new viral, i.e. if the company manages to tap into its customers new habits effectively, it will enjoy organic growth that originates from the viral campaign. For example, a recent habit is that customer take photos all the time, share them and upload them on social sites (Duncan & Everett, 2003). The company will leverage on this new habit by encouraging customers to take photos wearing the brand and share them to increase brand visibility (Caywood, Clarke & Ewing 2000). Localizing the mobile strategy will be included in the plan because ‘mobile’ has different meaning to different countries, regions or locations. The marketers will do research on different meanings of mobile in countries where Selfridge has physical presence. The marketers will then develop different mobile marketing content that suit different regions. Localizing the mobile marketing campaign will increase customer shopping experience and increase the convenience of obtaining information on the company’s products. In developing the mobile strategy, the company will prioritize on special offers because it has a limited window of opportunity to catch the attention of prospective customers. The campaign will put special offer first on the mobile site, including an opt-in which allows users to receive alerts when new offers arrive. This will boost the marketing response rates. The strategy will focus on ensuring that the mobile applications used to market the content are compatible with a wide range of mobile devices used by different customers. Therefore, the mobile marketing materials to be used will be compatible with major phone brands to ensure that all customers are able to use mobile platform to access product information. The mobile material will also be constantly updated whenever a new mobile device is launched into the market. The mobile marketing strategy will utilize hyper localized marketing, which is based on combining huge data analytical tools and IP geolocation technology to optimize on data insights and location data. This provides customers with unique information that is highly customized and relevant (Barry, Thomas & Howard, 2000). For example, mobile customers will be provided with discount coupons in real time, based on their location and how often they use the mobile marketing application. The success of the mobile marketing strategy will be evaluated by obtaining data and statistics on the number of people using the mobile marketing platform after the launch of the marketing campaign. Recommendations and Conclusion The marketing campaign should utilise multichannel marketing to reach a bigger audience. This will create awareness and increase brand visibility without incurring unnecessarily high costs. The message should be tailored to suit different audience based on their consumption behaviour and other characteristics such as income, economic status and gender. However, the message should be integrated to communicate the same message content despite the channel used. It is recommended that the marketing team monitor and review the campaign activities often to gauge the success of the marketing initiative, identify deviations from the expected results and address them in a timely manner (Wolter, 2003). The company should complement the marketing channels identified in this strategy with other emergent marketing platforms used by competitors to adapt to changes and keep up with the competition. Furthermore, other departments within the firm should complement marketing strategy by cross selling the products whenever they interact with customers. In conclusion, developing an integrated marketing communication strategy involves a lot of activities that mainly focus on understanding the company. Selfridge is a chain of high end departmental stores that was founded by Gordon Harry Selfridge. The basis of the stores success is the innovative marketing strategies that has been used over time. The strengths of the current marketing strategy used by Selfridge include, strong brand, healthy interactions with stakeholders and providing a good environment. Integrated marketing communication (IMC) refers to the application of consistent brand messaging across traditional and non-traditional marketing channels, using various promotional methods aimed at reinforcing each other (Schultz, 1996; Schultz, 1997). The marketing campaign strategy utilises multichannel platforms to sell and increase brand awareness and visibility (Cleland & Kim, 2005). 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