Marketing Reflection Paper of My Thoughts on Imc (integrated Marketing Communication).

Reflection paper 1: My thoughts on IMC (Integrated marketing communication)

Eshaa PANCHAL | B00746482

A relatively new technique, say around 20 years or so, Integrated marketing communications has revolutionized the way brands communicate with its (potential) customers. Without going in to extraordinarily boring detail – if one had to define the core of this idea in a single word, that word would be: ALIGNED. This alignment is key in every single element of your brand and sometimes even your state of mind (for luxury companies especially). This is very very hard and I say this from experience.

In my experience as a marketing & communications manager for luxury brands (Bottega Veneta, Paul Smith, TUMI etc.)  back home in India, we adopted integrating our communications – often because global brands required us to do so– and also, we realized that integrating communications would allow the customer to draw parallels and seeing the same messaging and visual assets would be more impactful.

I speak for myself when I say, that I didn’t have insight, or more specifically, I wasn’t conscious of the entire IMC process – encoding et al. I would inherently try my best to align all communications and assets being deployed - emailer, SMS’, digital content etc. But, this was not always the case - for example, one of our brands – Michael Kors’ performance was underwhelming and the retail team pestered (yes pestered) us to communicate a promotion – that in my opinion was against the brand DNA. With pressure from top management (because who listens to the marketing team anyway? psh!)  we did so. Of course, the execution was haphazard and we didn’t have the time to plan things out properly due to tight timelines. The promotion received a luke warm response and I wasn’t surprised because it went against the brand DNA. But, after attending the class on IMC, I can pin point the other trouble area, so here goes:

• The messaging was not clear and therefore the encoding wasn’t clear. This was due to tight turnaround times.
• If the messaging did go through, the noise around the channels used (Instagram, facebook, SMS’ & emailers) definitely diluted the effects.
• The promotion went against the brand DNA and therefore caused a dissonance in global and local messaging. This could have definitely led to a schism in the customers perception of the brand.

After our class on Friday, I feel like I could finally understand why our global offices asked us to do what they did. I could clearly look back and see the mistakes and areas that needed improvement.  Often there have been two varied messages going out at a point in time, or 2 different messages going out within a short period of one another and how the noise around our channels – and sometimes, even the noise we created – by way of several contradictory messages affected the success of our communication campaigns.