Integrated marketing communication is essentially the amalgamation of various marketing strategies adopted by a firm in order to ensure effective communication with all its stakeholders (Belch et. al., 2014). The idea behind using IMC is to optimize the message that the brand wishes to convey. Effective marketing is critical to the success of any organization as it helps in building the right positioning for the brand. This report throws light upon various IMC strategies adopted by The Amazon Inc. in order to optimize its communication process.
For any business organization to identify and analyze its consumer set, it is imperative to segment the market into various groups and target specific consumers from the same. Target market of any organization refers to the set of consumers whose needs the business aims to fulfill (Cross, Belich & Rudelius, 2015). Amazon has divided its market into the following segments.
Geographical segmentation: The first form of segmentation adopted by Amazon is geographical. This means that the firm divides its market based on geographical segments. At present Amazon has retail websites for US, UK, Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and Netherlands.
Demographic segmentation: Demographical segmentation done by amazon divides its target market on the basis of religion, age, nationality and income (Anable et. al., 2016). Amazon targets customers across different age groups and nationalities. Their retail store has a sundry variety of products catering to the needs of people across lower, middle and upper income groups. Students, working professionals and home makers are all targeted through Amazon’s product line.
Behavioral segmentation: In terms of behavior, Amazon target customers differently. For frequent shoppers, Amazon has offered ‘Prime account’ facility so that their products can reach them faster. Based on previous shopping behavior, Amazon also recommends consumers certain products that might be of interest to them.
Persuading a potential customer can lead to increased sales for a particular brand. Therefore organizations apply various persuasion strategies in order to convince the customer regarding the need for the product in their lives. The aim of these persuasion tools is to guide people towards accepting a certain belief, attitude or behavior.
There are various processes of persuasions that a brand can adopt. Amazon uses the influencer’s process and uses seven crucial tools of persuasions. These seven tools and their utilization by Amazon Inc. is as described below:
This tool of persuasion believes in the use of favors. Amazon often gives its customer discounts, gift vouchers and lucrative deals in order to attract them towards buying products off Amazon.
Amazon continues to offer excellent service to its customers. They deliver the products on or before the promised date. Their process of return and refund is extremely customer centric and works effectively in persuading customers to stick with the brand.
Amazon often receives endorsements from celebrities and socially renowned personalities. Moreover their service quality and social presence is impeccable and leads to a positive social image of the brand. Amazon’s social listening skills allows the brand to be aware of and respond to feedback received by the brand on these platforms.
Amazon tries to make its ads more and more relatable to the customers. Their celebrity endorsers in every country are well liked and respected and therefore this creates a liking in the minds of consumers leading to persuasion.
Amazon also uses authority as a tool to persuade customers to buy their products. For example, they often use beauticians promote using amazon to buy beauty products. If a particular movie is launched on Amazon Prime video, then advertisements including the director of the movie are released by Amazon. This makes people trust the ads and hence leads to enhanced persuasion.
Amazon has various products that are marked as ‘Amazon assured’. If any particular product is available through a third vendor, Amazon informs the buyer in advance. Amazon ensures that all the products that are delivered to a particular country are legal in that country and reached customer through ethical processes. These superior quality of products offered by Amazon persuades customers to buy the products.
Scarcity of a particular product creates an automatic demand for it (Koch & Benlian, 2015). Every time a user selects a particular product, Amazon informs the user about how many of these products are now remaining in stock, leading to an increased urgency within the consumer to buy that product. Amazon offers ‘Today’s deals’ to customers by letting customers know that various offers are available only for today. This in turn persuades customers to buy those products.
Amazon started as an online book store which further expanded into a plethora of products. This product line expansion has been possible through continued demand which is a result of extraordinary advertisements. Amazon has hired Ogilvy and Mather which is the most renowned advertising agency in order to curate effective content to reach out to its target market. Various forms of advertisements used by Amazon include television, newspaper, event, billboards, hoardings and influencer marketing.
The current advertisments by Amazon are extremely creative and bang on point. The logo of the brand itself marks an arrow from A to Z throwing light on the massive product line of the brand (Kristensen et. al., 2017). A lot of user generated content is also making rounds on the internet which effectively helps the brand in building trust among consumers. Analysis of the brand’s current advertisement is as below:
Creative: Amazon’s advertisements are creative and grab immediate attention. They introduce new forms of advertising and curate creative content to lure customers.
Need Identification: Through its advertisements, Amazon aims are identifying a particular need of a customer and tries to fulfill that need. This form of advertisement automatically grabs attention and creates interest.
Regional understanding: Amazon creates different advertisements for different markets based on the brands understanding of the markets. This makes the organization a lot more relatable to its consumers.
Lastly, Amazon also utilizes emotional appeal to reach out to its target customers
Amazon uses both traditional as well as 2.0 marketing strategies in order to reach out to its target consumers. Various IMC practices adopted by Amazon are as below:
Television advertisments are used by Amazon to target family audience. These advertisements are creatively curated and aim to attract viewers by being broadcasted on leading channels across different countries.
Social media marketing includes any form of marketing through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat or Twitter (Tuten & Solomon, 2017). Amazon has effectively used these platforms in order to set the right positioning in the minds of its consumers and to reach out to its targeted audience.
Event marketing is conducted by Amazon by sponsoring national and international level events including conferences, concerts and sports events. Event marketing allows brands to reach out to a wide variety of customers under a single roof (Winklemann et. al., 2016).
Newspaper advertisements by Amazon are also designed creatively with an intent of gaining attention of various readers. These ads are published in leading newspapers and help in gaining website traffic.
Billboards and hoardings are forms of outdoor advertising. These forms of advertising by Amazon allows the brand to reach out to various customers during a single day (Wilson, Baack & Till, 2015).
Conclusion
Integrated marketing communication strategies by Amazon are highly creative and the brand has been able to retain the position of the market leader with the help of these promotional strategies. Amazon’s IMC strategies have enabled the brand to have a strong positioning in the minds of its consumers (Blakeman, 2018). IMC plays a significant role in ensuring the growth and success of a brand and Amazon has played the card just right.
References
Anable, J., Kinnear, N., Hutchins, R., Delmonte, E. and Skippon, S., 2016. Consumer segmentation and demographic patterns (No. PPR769).
Belch, G.E., Belch, M.A., Kerr, G.F. and 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.
Cross, J.C., Belich, T.J. and Rudelius, W., 2015. How marketing managers use market segmentation: An exploratory study. In Proceedings of the 1990 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference (pp. 531-536). Springer, Cham.
Koch, O.F. and Benlian, A., 2015. Promotional tactics for online viral marketing campaigns: how scarcity and personalization affect seed stage referrals. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 32, pp.37-52.
Kristensen, M., Penner, J., Nguyen, A., Moy, J. and Lam, S., 2017. Company Synopsis for: Amazon. com, Inc.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage. United Kingdom.
Wilson, R.T., Baack, D.W. and Till, B.D., 2015. Creativity, attention and the memory for brands: an outdoor advertising field study. International Journal of Advertising, 34(2), pp.232-261.
Winkelmann, S., Dickenson, P., Souchon, A.L., Lee, N. and Michaelidou, N., 2016. Event marketing and event sponsorship: can too much of a ‘good’thing harm the brand?.
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