IMC mix
Paper instructions:
1. IMC Mix (5-7 pages)
1) Advertising (required)
a. Consider: (1) What is the objective of advertising?, (2) What is the opportunity or problem the advertising must address? (3) What do you want consumers to do as a result of the advertising? (3) Who are you talking to? (4) What is the key response you want? (5) What information/attributes might help produce this response? (6) Budget considerations (What % of your total budget will go to advertising?) and (7) other factors that might affect advertising decisions (e.g., major competitors use advertising heavily, etc).
b. Two ads. A television commercial (30 seconds) can be presented as a script or as a storyboard. It is your choice. See some samples. If you want to use a storyboard, the television script is divided into two columns. The left column is for visual instructions, and the right is for audio (including spoken copy, music, and sound effects). For a magazine ad, the ad should have the brand name, visual(s), tag line, and copy, etc.
c. Media Plan: Effective campaigns must reach the target audience to achieve the communication objectives. Delivering at a high reach and a high frequency is very expensive. In this section, you need to specify (1) reach and frequency objectives, (2) continuity, (3) media mix decision, and (4) advertising budget allocation among the media you selected. Although you don’t need to mention specific vehicle names (e.g., American Idol) in the report, identifying general categories (e.g., sports programs, news magazines, etc.) and dayparts (e.g., primetime, daytime, etc) would be informative. Again, it is important for you to provide your rationale.
• Reach and Frequency: A reach priority or a frequency priority? Why?
• Continuity: Which scheduling pattern (e.g., pulsing, flighting, etc) would be more effective? Why?
• Media mix: How many different advertising media (e.g., newspaper, magazines, network TV, cable TV, outdoor, radio, Internet, etc) do you want to use? Consider how often the target uses each medium. Also consider your creative strategy (e.g., there might be better media for the specific creative strategy and executions).
• Budget allocation: how much money for each medium and for each month (e.g., you can spend equal amount of money for several months).
2) Sale Promotion (you may decide not use any sale promotion, but justify your decision):
a. What is the objective of sale promotion?
b. In addition to the planning of advertising media, you can deliver messages to consumers in a variety of unique ways. Select sale promotion tool(s) that will help marketing and IMC goals. Sales promotions are designed for both retailers (push) and consumers (pull). Sales promotion tactics used with a push strategy encourage retailers to push your products to the client. Those tactics include trade promotions, product demonstrations, sales incentives, etc. Sales promotions for consumers include coupons, sweepstakes, rebates, etc.
3) Other promotional tools: Other promotional tools are direct mail, sponsorships, public relations events, publicity, etc. Select one or two different promotional tools. Explain how the promotion tools can obtain your IMC goal? Considering the given budget, are those promotions reasonable? Also, address when you want to implement those promotional tools.
a. Event (required): What is the objective of event? Events play a crucial role of new product (brand) launches. Develop an MPR event for the client brand.
b. What other IMC tools you want to use? What is the objective of each tool? How will you execute them?
