Role of IMC in marketing process

“It’s no longer enough to satisfy your customers, you must delight them”- Philip Kotler

Let's look at a small video about role of IMC in Marketing

An organization that wants to exchange products and services successfully in the marketplace must have a strategic marketing plan to guide the allocation of resources. All elements of marketing mix- product, place, price & promotion must be integrated to provide consistency and maximum communications impact. A framework is used to determine how promotion fits into an organization marketing strategy and programs. This model includes a marketing strategy and analysis, target marketing, program development, and the target market. The marketing process begins with a marketing strategy that is based on a detailed situation analysis and guides for target market selection.

Selecting the target market involves-identify the market with unfulfilled needs, determining market segments, selecting market to target and positioning through marketing strategies. Segmentation can be on the basis of geography( state-region-country), demographic( age, sex, income), psychographic (AIO, VALS), behaviouristic( Usage, loyalties, occasions) and benefit (type of specific needs or wants to be satisfied). In the planning process, the promotional process is developed after assuming the marketing strategy. One of the key decisions to be made pertains to the target marketing process, which includes identifying, segmenting, targeting and positioning to target markets. There can be several approaches to positioning- product or service attributes,  price/quality, use or application, product class, product or service user, competition and cultural symbols. Once the target marketing process has been completed, marketing program decisions regarding product, price, distribution and promotion should be taken. Pricing decisions should be taken in line with the perception of the brand or product. We can adopt a push or pull strategy to promote a product depending upon the requirements.

All of these should be well connected to give an integrated marketing communications perspective. Thus all product strategies, pricing strategies, advertising and promotion decisions should be made with the objective of contributing to the brand.