How do marketing communications affect the work performance ?

According to the studies carried out by numerous authors, three categories of consequences can be identified and they are related to marketing communications performance, brand performance and stakeholders.

The results achieved by Low, indicate that the effectiveness of advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing and public relations is higher when the organization achieved a high level of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), thus a strong relation between IMC and marketing communication performances can be observed.

Due to the lack of empirical evidence about the influence of IMC on the outcomes obtained by the organization, it is difficult to specify accurately the effects of IMC on organizational performance. However, from an operational perspective, we could deduct that IMC is likely to produce benefits in the coordination of marketing communication activities and in the coordination of the different functions involved in the implementation of marketing campaigns.

Cornelissen and Lock present these benefits as psychological and they observe also a reduction of internal conflicts and a decrease of transactional costs among functions. IMC provides important savings in additional costs relating to the organizational facilities. Cooperation among departments avoids unnecessary duplication of communication strategies and implies an improvement in operational efficiency and in message coherence.

From an individual campaign perspective, it would be reasonable to find out that organizations implementing IMC will achieve higher incomes for each campaign, as a functional outcome, together with the synergy among the elements of communication mix and the improvement of the ability of using a wider and more appropriate range of tools.

The success of campaigns could be measured using economic analysis of ROI through direct objectives, or in a more subjective way, by analyzing managerial perceptions about the relative success by comparison with competitors’ campaigns.

Generally, we would expect that the organizations applying IMC will have a greater capacity to achieve its direct and indirect objectives, such as a higher brand knowledge and preference, a more favorable attitude towards the brand and the increase of purchase intention. Furthermore, Duncan and Mulhern underline that organizations implementing IMC in a more adequate way will have a greater ability to achieve the direct and indirect campaign objectives.

One of the problem areas in marketing of great practical and theoretical significance about which much remains to be learned is the nature of market response to a firm's marketing mix. Marketers are therefore concerned about the coordination between communications and their sales and the expenses thereof. This study sought to examine the relationships existing between marketing communications activities and the sales performance of Vodafone. The study also made use of simple statistical tools such as tables, graphs, together with multiple regression analysis to determine the degree of variation between the dependent (sales volume) and independent variable (communication tools). The results indicated strong relationships between sales promotion, advertising budgets and total sales. There was however an inverse relationship between TV advertisements and sales. In addition, a negative relationship was also found to exist between sponsorship budget and total sales. The outcome indicates that Vodafone was not paying much attention to its total communication costs and the return on investment (ROI) on such expenditures. It is recommended therefore that management and other marketers in the industry regularly evaluate the marketing communications activities they engage in as this will inform them on how effective their communications activities are and what returns to expect on these marketing communications activities.

Agreed to the experts.................. thanks for the invitation ..............................

Marketing communications are messages and related media used to communicate with a market. Marketing communications is the "promotion" part of the "marketing mix" or the "four Ps": price, place, promotion, and product. It can also refer to the strategy used by a company or individual to reach their target market through various types of communication.

Thank You.