Advantages of Marketing Communication Mix

An organization’s promotional mix consisting of various promotion tools like advertising, sales
promotion, public relations, personal selling, direct-marketing tools and online, digital and
integrated marketing methods is called the Marketing Communications Mix.

It is the way to communicate your brand value to the consumer and build long-lasting customer
relationships.

Most often your advertising department and sales management team may be communicating
different messages to your consumers, which lead to an inconsistent promotional message. For
example, your newspaper advertisement might have promoted a certain price whereas the product
label doesn’t reflect the same price; this causes confusion in the mind of the consumer that further
aggravates due to a totally different message on your website! Since different communication
channels are handled by different departments of your organization, very often your marketing
communication mix falls out of sync. This is where the concept of Integrated Marketing
Communications (IMC) helps you integrate the various channels to deliver a uniform and
compelling message about your brand to the target audience. It brings together all the company’s
messages under one campaign to promote a single, clear and consistent positioning statement.
Mix Element Advantages Disadvantages
Advertising Good for building awareness Impersonal - cannot answer all a
Effective at reaching a wide audience customer's questions
Repetition of main brand and product Not good at getting customers to
positioning helps build customer trust make a final purchasing decision
Personal Selling Highly interactive - lots of Costly - employing a sales force has
communication between the buyer and many hidden costs in addition to
seller wages
Excellent for communicating complex / Not suitable if there are thousands of
detailed product information and important buyers
features
Relationships can be built up -
important if closing the sale make take
a long time
Sales Promotion Can stimulate quick increases in sales If used over the long-term, customers
by targeting promotional incentives on may get used to the effect
particular products Too much promotion may damage
Good short term tactical tool the brand image
Public Relations Often seen as more "credible" - since Risk of losing control - cannot always
the message seems to be coming from a control what other people write or
third party (e.g. magazine, newspaper) say about your product
Cheap way of reaching many customers
- if the publicity is achieved through
the right media