[MUSIC] In the previous lecture we overviewed the elements of effective communications. In this lecture, we will elaborate on the types of marketing communications objectives. Most of the time, we believe that, objective of marketing communications is to sell something. Yes we do want to sell something, but we can do that, only if people are aware of our product, know them well and have a positive attitude toward it. Marketing communications campaigns may have four different types of objectives. Create awareness, disseminate information, change attitudes and change behavior. Increasing brand awareness is one of the most common objectives. The aim is to become known and memorable. Creating brand awareness is to inform our target audience about our brand and about our product. There are two different types of awareness, Basic Awareness or Top-Of-Mind Awareness. A brand that is new to the market needs to pursue basic awareness to acquire new customers. However, creating brand awareness does not necessarily apply to all the new brand introductions. Sometimes an existing brand which tries to penetrate new markets may also pursue basic awareness. Campaigns that target basic awareness will emphasize the brand name by repeating it multiple times. To achieve awareness without irritating consumers by such repetition is a challenging task. These campaigns, most of the time, involve humorous and dramatic appeals to entertain consumers. We should always be careful about delivering our message without boring our consumers. The success of these campaigns is assessed by brand recognition. Which measures what percentage of the population recognizes a brand with a given list of brand names. The other type of brand awareness campaigns pursues top-of-mind awareness. Companies that target top-of-mind awareness do not just want to be recognized. They want to be present and more importantly salient in the consumers’ minds. The challenge of creating top-of-mind awareness is quite different than basic awareness. Here consumers are already aware of the brand. To achieve top-of-mind awareness, brands need to come up with interesting, attaching grabbing slogans. And communicate these through multiple channels. The idea is to create and increase the amount of word of mouth and buzz around the brand. Top-of-mind awareness is assessed by brand recall. To measure brand recall we survey consumers and ask them to tell the first few brands in a specific category that come to their minds without any help. Another common marketing communications objective is to disseminate information about the product. Ideally, this should be a single message, communicating the customer proposition in the most compelling way possible. The main intention is to inform the consumers and establish a close link between the information and the brand. Information dissemination campaigns additionally target to enhance the perceived importance of that information. For example, Walmart has repetitively used "always low prices" as a tagline and managed to associate Walmart with low prices. They also convinced the consumers that it is okay for them to be price conscious, because quality is more or less the same. We see that Walmart actually made consumers feel more comfortable and maybe even smarter to be price conscious. We see that the awareness and information dissemination campaigns are trying to capture share of minds. Attitude change campaigns on the other hand try to create an emotional response in consumers. These campaigns try to establish or change the attitudes toward the brand. Many brands that need to strengthen their position in the market and protect against competitors, will move their communications from an awareness or information dissemination objective to an attitude change objective. Most of the time the focus of these campaigne is the person in the target audience rather than the brand itself. For example Volvo is a brand that is known for its commitment to safety. Volvo when first started communicating, introduced and emphasized the product features such as daytime running lights or driver's side air bags to establish it safety perception. The main message was that Volvo cars are safe. Now they have started emphasizing the driver instead. Volvo drivers care about the safety of their families. In both types of campaigns we observe that the target audience is people that have a high need for safety. So the positioning of the brand is similar. The difference is that the former is sharing the information about Volvo, whereas the later is intending to create an image, an attitude about Volvo. Finally, we have marketing communications campaigns that are designed to elicit a behavior. Usually, they contain a call for action. For example, the objective might be to get the consumer to pick up the phone and call or to go to the store, or just to visit the company website. So well could tell either one of these communications objectives for a campaign. The important thing is before we start designing our marketing communications campaign we should clearly set our communications objectives. We should ask ourselves a simple question. What do we want people to think, feel, or do after they hear our product or our brand. The answer to this question will help us identify our communications objective. In this lecture we have covered different communication objectives. Please please do not forget that, some campaigns may achieve multiple objectives. In the next lecture we'll talk about consumers decision making process. [MUSIC]
