MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Marketing Communications: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities

Marketing Communications: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities

This essay discusses the challenges and opportunities of marketing communication used for brands. The type of marketing communication analyzed in this paper is online social networking (OSN)

Introduction

During the past decade, the role of technological development has risen to an absolutely new level. Given the advances in technology, Internet accessibility and mobility, such phenomenon brought substantial changes into consumers' lives. In very short time World Wide Web has dramatically influenced the way people communicate shop, work, learn, and stay connected. More efficiently than ever before they can access, share, exchange the information as well as communicate in realtime no matter where they are or what are they doing.

Moreover, the emergence of another widely recognized phenomenon known as social media enabled consumers to do even more and even more efficiently and conveniently. Such form of media “describes a variety of new sources of online information that are created, initiated, circulated and used by consumers intent on educating each other about products, brands, services, personalities, and issues” (Blackshaw & Nazzaro , 2004).

Today social media, also referred to as consumer-generated media (CGM) is continuously growing in both number and format on the Internet. It also to be referred to any number of online word-ofmouth vehicles, including but not limited to: consumer-to-consumer e-mail, postings on public Internet discussion boards/forums, Usenet newsgroups and listservs, consumer ratings Web sites or forums, blogs (short for Web logs), moblogs (sites where users post digital images/photos/movies), vlogs (video blogs), social networking Web sites and individual Web sites.

Although influenced or stimulated by traditional marketers and marketing activities, online word of mouth is nonetheless owned and controlled by consumers, and it often carries far higher credibility and trust than traditional media, especially as media channels become more fragmented and less trusted. The growth of CGM's influence poses challenges and opportunities for marketers (Blackshaw & Nazzaro , 2004). Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is one of the great initiatives to develop a guiding principle organizations follow to communicate with their target markets taken by academics during past decades. Integrated marketing communications attempts to coordinate and control the various elements of the promotional mix - advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion - to produce a unified customer-focused message, and, therefore, achieve various organizational objectives (Boone and Kurtz, 2007).

However, though IMC is tightly tied to the lives of consumers at home, at work, and on the go, it has experienced substantial changes since its inception. Basically those changes are resulting from two primary shifts in the relationship between marketers and consumers. The first shift emerges from technological development perspective. As consumers' lives change, given the current explosion of advances in technology itself, accessibility of Internet, mobility and efficiency, so are the modes and strategies of marketing communications.

That was the basic premise of the integrated marketing communication movement that attempted to align and coordinate the firm's external marketing communication activities so that a clear and concise message ...