In this module, we're going to talk about how one goes about designing a communications campaign. Professor Barbara Khan in her earlier modules, spoke to you about what are the various components of a go-to-market plan. She talked about five Cs and four Ps. One of the P's of course was product design. The next one was pricing. The third one she discussed which again we went into greater detail was about distribution. The one that we're going to focus on today is promotions. So what does promotions include in terms of decision-making? One part of promotions is communication strategy and communication strategy, we either use mass or targeted media. That could be TV, digital, print, outdoors, and that includes advertising. Communications could also include things like product placement and also public relations, and then we also have within the field of promotions, what we call as personal and interpersonal means of communication. That's through sales force or word of mouth. Word of mouth can be from consumer to consumer, it can be offline or online. We also communicate with the consumer at the point of purchase oftentimes, in-store promotions, online when somebody comes through our website, they see a sticker which says this is on sale. The other way to promote one's products or services is through non-communications means, and that is either through price discounts or coupons. In this module, we are primarily going to focus on communication strategy and that's through mass and targeted media. But I think it's worthwhile for a moment to just talk about a few of the things that we're not going to go into detail that are also useful. For example, what do we mean by product placement? Oftentimes, when I ask this question, people say, ''It's where you place the product in the store.'' That's not what product placement is. Product placement is placing your product or service in a television series or a movie. Like the BMW car in a James Bond movie. That's what we call product placement. Now, why companies use product placement? Because there is a belief that anything that looks like advertising is actually less effective than something that is somewhat indirect. So seeing a BMW car in a James Bond movie doesn't seem like usual advertising and there is a belief amongst advertisers and communications people that anything that's not in your face is actually more effective. Let's talk a little bit about public relations also. Public relations, I think we all know what the word means. Oftentimes, people say public relations is something that's free. Public relations is not really free. What is really free in the public relations part is that you don't pay for the media, which means you don't pay for time and space. But creating an activity that deserves public relations and media mentions is reasonably expensive. So this is an area that can be managed quite well. It's very effective, but it is not an area where you actually pay for either time or space. Personal and interpersonal communication is a very powerful means of promoting your products and services. This can be done through sales force. It can also be done through word of mouth, one customer talking to another and this can be managed quite well. Pharmaceutical companies have managed this for years even before online came into existence, and even today with online, when you actually measure the word of mouth, 80 percent of word of mouth is actually offline person-to-person and only 20 percent is today online. Let's now reflect back on our communications campaign design which is either through mass or targeted media. So in this module, we'll focus on a few things a little bit more. One is, what role does communications play in our marketing strategy? In other words, for most of you, you might use an advertising agency or a communications agency. How do you get the best out of them? We'll spend some time on how do you actually design a message. Media planning and budgeting also deserve attention. But in this session, we will not talk too much about that. We'll spend quite a bit of time on measuring the effects of your communications campaign and then summarize with some key lessons. Let's start with an example. Many of you may have seen the milk campaign. That was a very popular campaign. This was done by the California Milk Board in 1992. So what did they find? When they talk to consumers, they basically found most people like milk. They also felt milk was healthy. Kids felt milk is cool and fun. Teens felt milk makes you stronger and beautiful. But yet when you looked at the data in terms of what was happening to milk consumption, it was going down rapidly. At a time when people felt good about the product, at a time when people felt it was a cool product, yet when you looked at the actual consumption, it was going down. Not just slowly, but quite a bit and milk producers were very concerned about this. So they started looking into what is the cause of the problem and what is the remedy? As they look deeper, what they found was people wanted to drink milk, but often they didn't have milk at home. They felt that based on these interviews and focus groups that if you could just convince people to have milk at home, consumption will go up, and this is true not just for milk. People have found this in other product categories. Also for example, soft drink companies have found it in their studies that if you have more Coca-Cola at home, you'll drink more of it. Same way shampoo. If you have more shampoo left in the bottle, you'll consume more. So if you look at the amount of shampoo people pour on their hand before they put it on their head, it's very closely related to how much shampoo is left in the bottle. When you have a new bottle of shampoo, you pour more on your hand. When very little is left, you pour less. Of course, less is also just fine, especially for people who don't have that much hair. But still the consumption of shampoo is related to how much you have at home. Milk producers found the same thing that if people just had more milk at home, they will drink more, and the idea was then how do you say it in a very creative and a memorable way so that people would actually have milk at home? Many decisions have to be made. For example, they had to decide who should they talk to? What should they tell them in terms of what they should do, think or feel about milk? What specifically did we want to achieve? Was it about increasing consumption? Was it about getting more people? How are you going to say that in terms of your message? What media you are going to use, TV, digital, billboards? How much money you're going to spend? Then how do you measure whether it is going to be effective or not? So for each of these questions, these were the planned answers they had in their mind, and this is on which the communications campaign was based. So their target audience they said it's not about getting new people to drink milk. There are enough people who drink milk already, but we want them to drink more. So the target segment here was people who currently drink milk. Make sure you have enough milk at home, that was the message content. Why? Because they believed that if they just had more milk at home, they'd consume more. The mission of the campaign was increasing milk consumption by one glass per week within a year, and they came up with a campaign which we'll talk more about. Media strategy was TV and print. They had to decide on a budget, and they had already put in place measurement and their mission which is we wanted to have a certain level of recall in three months, and they came up with a campaign. Many of you may have seen these ads. They're also available on YouTube. You can go and see them. There's a lot of continuity in this campaign. It's the same message repeated in many different ways, in many different contexts. Sometimes they use celebrities. We will talk about that in this module, and sometimes they'll just use regular people. Again, we'll talk about that. But here is something important to keep in mind. In any communication campaign, you have to make these seven decisions. What are these seven decisions? This is what we call as seven M's of a communications campaign. I hope from your previous modules, remember what are the four P's and what are the five Cs. Now we have the seven M's of designing your communication campaign. M number one is who you are going to talk to? M number two is what should we tell them? M number three what do we want to achieve, in terms of awareness, knowledge, interests, trial? How should we say it? That's how the creative strategy comes in. The next part is media strategy. How do we reach them? Then how much am I going to spend? Then was it worth it? So for the purpose of this session, we are not going to spend too much time on media strategy and money. We're going to spend more time on the other M's. Because I think those are the first few that you need to get a good handle on. Also when you open a typical textbook in marketing and you go to the chapter on designing a communications campaign, what you'll find is that it has only five M's in it. That doesn't mean that the book is not good enough, I think the book is trying to send you a signal. That the first two M's, who's your target segment and what is your key message or your value proposition? Is a decision that you should make well before you get to designing your communication campaign. Reflect back on what Professor Khan said in her session about positioning. What are the three key components of a positioning statement? Who's your target segment and what are your points of difference? That's exactly where markets and message content comes from. This should have been decided well before you get to designing a communications campaign. So let's start with the first key M which is solely within the purview of a communications campaign and that is mission.
