Integrated Marketing Communications is a widely used concept which ensures that each and every forms of communications or the messages are linked together. In business context it helps in integrating all tools used for the promotional activities (Belch et al. 2014). The concept is significantly helpful in cases where the concerned organizations is facing reputational damage or any negative impression for their image as an organizations. In such cases the concept will be instrumental for the organizations in providing justifications for their actions in front of their stakeholders and shareholders. The need behind this justification is evident in the competitive market. The modern business market is significantly competitive and in order to survive in this competitive business market, the organizations are feeling significant need to project themselves along with their business operations in a better manner which will be able to ensure the trust of the customers. In the modern business market, the formation of the customer loyalty and the assurance of the trust of the customers is highly essential for the organization in order to obtain the competitive edge in the intensely competitive business market.
The concept of the integrated marketing communications produces the organizations with the absolute choice in order to meet their need (Brunello, 2013). Even if promotion is a single part in the 4 Ps of the marketing mix, Promotion includes its own mix of the tools that are used for the communication. It is observed that all these tools work significantly well when they are integrated to each other than their individual operation. The breaking down of the concept will provide seven different aspects which are significantly important like the foundation, corporate culture, brand focus, consumer experience, communication, promotional and integration tools (Luxton, Reid & Mavondo, 2015). The success of the IMC activities depend on these aspects in a significant manner. The smoother integration of these aspects is instrumental in the increasing the success of the objective of the organization in undertaking the activity.
The paper focuses on the issue of the commonwealth bank which faced a reputational damage after it was fined by the banking regulatory agencies of the nation. The paper provides a detailed description on the concerned issue and the target market for the IMC program. The paper also specifies the IMC communication objectives and along with that it also provides detailed information on the communication strategy mix, creative strategy and media mix. Apart from that the paper also includes the budget concepts for the IMC activity and evaluation metrics for the assessment of the success.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia faced considerable number of controversies in recent time related to their business operations. The series of events that happened one after another had some serious impact on the public image of the organization. Recently an evidence recorded at the Banking Royal Commission exposed the commonwealth bank for charging their dead customers in the name of financial advices. The organization charged their customers for multiple times in this fashion where they took the money from the customers who did not even experience any such financial advices. The evidences came from the organization’s count financial business which portrayed multiple events in which even dead customers were charged money for financial advices.
The organization conducted this through their financial advisers and repetitive events where their advisers got exposed can be cited. One of their advisers were found to be charging a customer for the financial advices and was even getting an amount of $65 on per month basis even in the year 2014 and 2015 (commbank.com.au, 2018). Evidences claimed that the concerned customer died in the year 2004. The adviser was questioned for this deed and in his answer, he claimed that he tried to contact the public trustee but he was not heard back by anyone regarding the issue. One such event also took place when another adviser was recorded to continue charging a customer even after the death in the year 2007. The wife of the customer was contacted in the year 2013 but the financial adviser did not stop charging.
According to a document of CBA, another incident was recorded where an adviser was found to be charging service fees to multiple customers but the adviser was not able to show any proof of the fact that he provided services. The bank got into serious trouble as repetitive events of the same calibre were not acknowledged by the bank as some serious systemic issue and senior counsel assisting Michael Hodge questioned bank’s intention in the matter as well. This recorded a payment of $700 million as fine from the Common Wealth Bank (treasury.gov.au, 2018). Along with this the executive general manager of Private Bank at CBA also acknowledged that the commonwealth financial planning was receiving commissions from their customers who entered into the system of the commission arrangement after 1st July 2013 even with the introduction of the Future of Financial Advice Laws (commbank.com.au, 2018). Apart from this the organization lost data of 19.3 million accounts in the year 2018 as well which created significant amount of chaos among the customers and stakeholders (commbank.com.au, 2018).
The organization was facing detrimental impacts of these mentioned events and needed to communicate to the customers and justify their part to the customers and the stakeholders. Hence in order to address this reputational damage of the organization, the organization is need to implement integrated marketing communications activity which will be instrumental in their try to justify their operations (Naeem, Bilal & Naz, 2013). The IMC activity will be dedicated towards the customers, employees, government as these are the concerned parties who are affected by the events at the maximum level.
The need to communicate to the customers is significant for the organization as their financial plans or the policies were dedicated for the customers. The impact of the events were tremendous as it was able to create a state where the customers were significantly concerned with the operations of the bank. The unethical conduct of the bank was highly influential for the customers as it was instrumental in decreasing the level of trust that the customers had on the bank’s operations. Hence it was much needed from the bank’s point of view that they implement the IMC in order to convince the customers. The target customers for the communication will be the nominees of the account holders or service receivers so that they knew about the bank’s operations (Šeri?, Gil-Saura & Ruiz-Molina, 2014). This will be instrumental for them in order to operate in the absence of the account holder or the service receivers.
It was observed that the employees were the main field experts in this case as the concerned issue significantly highlights how the bank’s financial advisers were used by the bank in order to conduct the unethical task. Though the employees were observed to report the issues to the higher authority but still they were subjected to the legal investigations. The IMC activity will make sure that the employees have the trust on the bank regarding these sort of issues and the fear among them regarding the legal procedures does not affect their business operations (Thorson & Moore, 2013). As the impact of the event was significant among the financial advisers, the program needs to be directed toward them as well.
The government is a significantly important stakeholder for the organization and the detrimental effects of the events conducted by the bank significantly affects the government and the regulatory agencies of it. The rules and regulations formed by the regulatory agencies are intended to monitor the smooth and ethical operations of the banking sector with specific focus on the benefits of the customers. Hence the unethical conducts of the organizations which are violating the rules and regulations of the government agencies are need to be taken care by the government. As the bank has the liability towards the regulatory agencies with the acceptance of the agreement, the IMC program will be dedicated towards the government agencies as well so that they have the knowledge of justification of the bank (Batra & Keller, 2016).
IMC is plan, prepared to connect to the customers who are in a state of confusion of panic regarding their association with the bank. The customers who are availing the bank’s financial business policy in the form of the financial advisers will be the main target and along with that the overall customer base of the bank will also be subjected to the implementation of the plan as with the occurrence of such events, the public image of the bank will be losing its previous position. Hence the general objectives of the plan will be
The organization needs to make a creative idea for the campaign as the general customers are needed to get attracted to the message that is shared by the organization in the campaign. The attractiveness of the message shared through the campaign is much needed as it needs to make sure that the customers get engaged to the campaign with the introduction of the message. As the main motive of the campaign is to get the attention of the customers, the organization must be significantly concentrated in making sure that the creativity of the message gets acknowledged by the target market (Blakeman, 2018). In order to make sure that the message be creative and at the same time it is able to address the actual concern of the customers, the concerned organization needs to put strong emphasis on the major aspects like the checking of the financial statement of the customer’s bank accounts. As Commonwealth bank faced the huge fine due to their unethical conduct in the financial advice section, the customers will be significantly worried about their money. The bank needs to make sure that their creative strategy in sharing the message for the customers be concentrated on below mentioned two aspects.
The language for the sharing of the message will be English as that is widely used in the country and the tone of the message will be informal as that will be significant in making sure that the customers acknowledge the messages as just a necessary request rather than an order. The aim of the organization is to spread the message “Check the Statement”. The general aim of the campaign is to increase the trust of the general customers on the concerned bank and in order to do so the best approach will be to aware the customers. The message will request the customers to check their financial statements and that will helpful for the customers to track any sort of impurity in the statements. As with the publication of such unethical conduct, the bank is on the verge of being acknowledged as one of the worst service providers in the nation, it is high time that the organization puts this message in front of the target market so that the organization be able to portray themselves as one such company that thinks of their customers.
The next message will be “we charge only against evidences”. The message is again a strategy that is to be taken in order to increase the trust towards the public image of the organization. As the organization was found to be charging customers in the name of the financial advices even without any sort of evidences of the production of those advices, hence the would be customers will be having second thoughts before availing the policy. Hence the organization will face significant difficulty in increasing the revenue. So the publication of the message that the organization will only charge after providing the sufficient proof for their service will enable them to reduce the concern of their customers. Hence it is a much needed message to increase the creativity and effectiveness of the campaign.
The concerned organization is one of the main components of the banking sector of the nation. Hence the reputation of the organization will be immense in managing their business operations. With the huge fine imposed by the regulatory agency, the reputation of the bank has faced some major set-backs. The positioning of the IMC will be significant in this respect. The positioning of the IMC campaign will be based in such a way that the customers be able to understand the activities that the organization has undertaken in order to make sure that such unethical business conduct is not repeated again. The language will be chosen depending on the area of promotion and as the country significantly communicates in English, the basic medium of communication will be English but that can alter depending on the circulation of the advertisement.
Marketing mix has multiple number of components. The communication mix covers the components which are helpful for the company in connecting with the customers. Since the marketing communication has become important these days, the vehicles or the communications mix are also important. The declining reputation of the Commonwealth Bank can be restructured by the help of such communication tools. The customer concept is to be followed in order to receive better results. The marketing communication tools are important in dealing with the customer concepts and mold the products or services according to the customer choices. The six common variables of the communication mix are advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing /internet marketing and packaging (Barker, 2013). The Commonwealth Bank can re-connect with the public and share their own perspective. As long as the company itself does not interacts with the customers, it will never know what the customers think about them, what are their perspectives towards them and how that perspective can be changed if it is wrong some way or the other.
The strategy of advertising has always impacted the purchasing behavior of the customers. Advertising can be of various form but there are two basic forms of advertising which includes the ATL advertising and the BTL advertising or more aptly said the out of home advertising. ATL advertising is the advertisements via radio, television and print media (Burgers et al., 2015). Advertising is highly used in the companies which have huge capitals and a lot of competitors too in the market. Advertising needs to have proper and impactful advertising message to connect with the public out there. The Commonwealth Bank can do the advertising campaigns via television commercials of 120 seconds on the business channels like ABC news and Sky news.
It is the second common method to communicate between the service of the organization and the end customer. It is the method by which the benefits of the service are declared to the target customers to achieve better customer preference. This particular method used by stable companies as well as small entrepreneurs. According to this method, the company promoter stays present in the outlet. It is an effective strategy to have the brand promoter present at the outlet. It grabs the attention of the customers more. Instead of the brand promoter, the sales man also can do the same but he has to be well-trained and extremely knowledgeable about the company.
Sales promotion of the company can be done by many ways. It can be done by providing the customers incentives on the purchase of some product or service. The dealers or the distributors also can be given incentives on selling and marketing the service in the market. The E-commerce business has raised the popularity of such incentives and supported in attracting more customers (McCombs, 2018). Huge quantity of sales can be experienced by the one day ‘deal’ or ‘sale ‘online. The Commonwealth Bank can restore its previous sales rates by applying this strategy.
The public relations at the same time must be maintained. It is the method to spread the news of the service to the customers. Social media in this respect is a better place to maintain the public relations. The Commonwealth Bank can take the help of press conferences, individual interactions with the customers, newspaper advertorials in the second page of the newspapers like “The Australian and The Age” and many other ways to connect with the customers directly and keep strong public relations.
Digital marketing is another way to give tough competition to the existing competitors in the market. The previous television marketing and newspaper marketing has been overtaken by the modern use of social media marketing. It is the cheap and best way to reach out to the end customers (Mulhern, 2013).The Facebook profile, twitter profile are the platforms to conduct digital marketing.
Packaging is considered to be the part of marketing mix and not communications mix. It is a nice way to communicate with the customers. In the service industry like banking, the term packaging refers to the overall outer appearance of the service the customer is buying.
It is important for all the companies to utilize proper media mix strategies so that the company may communicate its message in an effective manner. Whether or not the customer perceives the message communicated by the company in the right spirit or not has to be then understood by the company by various methods such as surveys and customer feedback. These are the steps taken by the company to gauge the effectiveness of the communication strategy and mix. The company must alter and change the mix as per the convenience of the business and in what ways such change can be brought can be decided under the supervision of the senior management.
The media mix of the company constitutes Television, radio, digital, print, social media usage in the most appropriate way that is possible for the particular case for which the IMC and the media mix is developed. The company must understand its basic need and why it is endeavouring to develop a marketing communication and media mix. The advertisement modes in the various Medias are different according to the nature of media (Wu & Chang, 2013). For example in the television media the advertisement gaps are small and the total message has to be said within a few seconds. On the other hand in the advertisement given in the newspaper the advertiser can utilise as much space as required to write in details about the service or the product. And in the case of digital media people do not have patience to see a long advertisement so they may skip, therefore the starting of the advertisement must be very crispy and attractive so that people may stay with the advertisement till the end. Radio advertisements are mainly designed with the best sound effects and the surround music so that it is pleasant to the ears (Wijaya, 2015).
In the case of Commonwealth bank, the bank is mainly targeting to resolve the problem of the various scandals it has faced at various times due to fraudulent practices in the various sectors. So the main idea is to bring back the goodwill of the bank and re-establish it as a reputed bank in the country. It has been seen that most of the bank account holders are in the social media. So the bank must make an animated video referring to all its good works and achievements and post it as a sponsored advertisement in the social media, mainly in Facebook and twitter, so that people may know about the good works of the bank. In the television the testimonials of the satisfied customers can be put up as video advertisements so that the general people may connect and understand that the bank offers good service. In the newspapers the bank must give detailed point to point answers to the allegations that are raised against it in details along with listing all the achievements and the positive points about the bank in general (Todorova, 2015).
This media mix will be very helpful for the Commonwealth Bank to reconnect with the customers and to regain its lost goodwill.
(Information Courtesy: Statista.com)
|
Medium of Communication |
Estimated Cost in Australian Dollars |
Time Period |
|
Television |
$152000 (5 of forty seconds) |
Four months |
|
Radio |
$900 to $ 4500 per week |
Three Months |
|
Digital |
$20000 |
Five Months |
|
|
$3000 to $6000 for advertisements occupying one-fourth section of a page |
Five times in each of the four months. |
|
Social Media |
$0.50 to $0.71 for each click |
Six Months |
|
Total |
175900.5 to 182500.7 considering only one social media click |
Each month |
A survey will be implemented at the end of the six month campaign in order to assess the success of the events or the campaign. The concept of survey enables the organizations to have a detailed assessment of the impact of the campaign. The survey will be subjected to the targeted section of the market along with the general customers as well as that will enable the organization to have a clear picture of the market. The thought and reaction of the customers will be assessed by the survey in order to analyse the impact of the campaign. This will be significant in order to assess the response of the target market after the campaign regarding how the customers feel for the services of the commonwealth bank. The survey will also be significantly helpful for the organization in order to get an account of the problems that are faced by the customers in following the messages shared by the campaign (Fowler Jr, 2013). Apart from this, the customers will have the chance to post their feedbacks through the social media platforms which were used for the campaign and that will be instrumental for the organization to assess the social, cultural and economic impact of the campaign.
Conclusion:
On a concluding note, it can be stated that the IMC is focused on considerable number of medium of mass communication. The concerned organization has the necessary resources to implement the plan and the main motive of the campaign will be to address the reputational damage that the concern organization faced with the mentioned events. It is recommended that the organization must make a list of the problems that are faced by the customers in following the messages shared through the campaign and that needs to be evaluated in a proper manner to make sure that necessary restructuring of the activities take place to provide the extra ease to the customers in availing the financial policies of the concerned organization.
References:
Barker, R. (2013). Strategic integrated communication: An alternative perspective of integrated marketing communication?. Communicatio, 39(1), 102-121.
Batra, R., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Integrating marketing communications: New findings, new lessons, and new ideas. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 122-145.
Belch, G. E., Belch, M. A., Kerr, G. F., & Powell, I. (2014). Advertising: An integrated marketing communication perspective. McGraw-Hill Education.
Blakeman, R. (2018). Integrated marketing communication: creative strategy from idea to implementation. Rowman & Littlefield.
Brunello, A. (2013). The relationship between integrated marketing communication and brand equity. International Journal of Communication Research, 3(1), 9.
Burgers, C., Konijn, E. A., Steen, G. J., & Iepsma, M. A. (2015). Making ads less complex, yet more creative and persuasive: The effects of conventional metaphors and irony in print advertising. International Journal of Advertising, 34(3), 515-532.
Commission, R. (2018). Royal Commission. Retrieved from https://treasury.gov.au/royal-commission/
Fowler Jr, F. J. (2013). Survey research methods. Sage publications.
Luxton, S., Reid, M., & Mavondo, F. (2015). Integrated marketing communication capability and brand performance. Journal of Advertising, 44(1), 37-46.
McCombs, M. (2018). Setting the agenda: Mass media and public opinion. John Wiley & Sons.
Mulhern, F. (2013). Integrated marketing communications: From media channels to digital connectivity. In The Evolution of Integrated Marketing Communications (pp. 19-36). Routledge.
Naeem, B., Bilal, M., & Naz, U. (2013). Integrated marketing communication: a review paper. Interdisciplinary journal of contemporary research in business, 5(5), 124-133.
Personal banking including accounts, credit cards and home loans – CommBank. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.commbank.com.au/
Šeri?, M., Gil-Saura, I., & Ruiz-Molina, M. E. (2014). How can integrated marketing communications and advanced technology influence the creation of customer-based brand equity? Evidence from the hospitality industry. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 39, 144-156.
Thorson, E., & Moore, J. (Eds.). (2013). Integrated communication: Synergy of persuasive voices. Psychology Press.
Todorova, G. (2015). Marketing communication mix. Trakia Journal of sciences, 13(1), 368-374.
Trust in news in Australia as of February 2018, m. (2018). Australia – trust in news by main source 2018 | Statistic. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/888496/australia-trust-in-news-by-main-source/
Wijaya, B. S. (2015). The development of hierarchy of effects model in advertising. International Research Journal of Business Studies, 5(1).
Wu, Y., & Chang, K. (2013). Network diversity and social cohesion in creative performance: a view of communication media mix.
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