Apple Inc.

Apple Inc.

Introduction

In today's heavily cluttered marketplace with heavily fragmented media and heavily time-taxed consumers, companies are struggling to get the kind of exposure for their products they used to get 30 years ago. In order to get noticed, and in an attempt to cut through the noise generated by so much advertising and promoting of product, companies are smartly creating highly-focused communications that more accurately reflect the desired brand's image and using the same style of executions in all mediums and at all touchpoints with target consumers. The result? Higher brand recall by consumers, more effective awareness, more impact from marketing dollars spent and a higher probability of triggering desired outcomes, namely, favorable perceptions and purchases.

Thirty years ago, all Proctor & Gamble had to do to reach well over 70% of the homemaker market segment was run a few TV commercials on a few different daytime TV shows (usually soap operas). Today, with the proliferation of now hundreds of TV stations and programming options, and with fewer stay-at-home spouses, P&G would reach a mere fraction of that with the same method. Add to that the the many other mediums and modes of communication we have today and you can see why company executives scratch their heads about how to best reach their target audience. The number of people with computers, Internet access (to millions of "channels"), cell phones, portable media receivers, etc, between 25-to 45-year-olds is staggering compared to just five years ago-and it is still growing.

Today, companies must use a wide and varied mix of media to reach a large portion of their audience, save for the middle and elderly part of the Senior market, but even that is changing. And in order to create a lasting impression and to trigger certain perceptions in the future at a moment's glance they need to ensure consistency in look, feel, style, tone, color and message at every touchpoint with consumers. And, equally importantly, they need to do it with a highly-impactful visual layout and few words. And it is not as easy as it may seem.

Creating integrated marketing communications, then, means expressing the core brand message in the same or very similar fashion at every touchpoint with the target consumer (or business-to-business customer). As humans, we can really only comprehend just a few ideas at any one time so very focused messaging is usually more effective, anyway. Still, companies struggle with this because they have so much they want to say. But what they are learning (finally, after all these years) is that they can say way more visually about their brand, in the few seconds they have our attention, then we would have time (or care to take the time) to read about their brand. Enter now the world of perceptual management and see what companies are really getting a handle on and why integrated marketing communications will become the standard practice for all brands.

"Perceptions" are what drives purchasing behavior. Perceptions are formed in our minds through judgments-sometimes immediately and ...