Promotional Campaign For Samsung Gear: Integrated Marketing Communication Strategies

Literature Review

Discuss about the Promotional Campaign for Samsung Gear.

Samsung Gear is the first network connected watch which enables the user to make and receive calls, checks SMS, emails and updates when the phone is far away from the user. The user can do the other things anywhere without missing an important call or update. The Samsung Gear is the next big thing to stay connected. It is a smart watch released as an Android-based device. Now it has replaced the operating system with Tizen from May 2014 (www.samsung.com/au, 2016).

Today, marketers have various choices about how and where to advertise their goods and services. Apart from traditional approach like direct marketing, print advertising, marketers have mobile marketing, email marketing; web based marketing, social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Many companies have learned the tough way like traditional print advertising which does not work at all on social media sites and vice versa. To create a successful integrated marketing campaign, marketers cannot depend on one formula. Various steps have to be adopted by the companies and marketers to increase viewership (Šerić, Gil-Saura & Ruiz-Molina, (2014).

Integrated Marketing Communication is the theory where a business combines and organizes their link channel to provide clear and consistent information about their company. Integrated Marketing Communication is a combination of various advertising tools to bring clarity, consistency, and maximum communication effect (Morrison, 2016).

The concept of communication integration was introduced in 1930. During this period, sales representative used started working with the advertising team. In 1966, various scholars recommended a combination of the promotional device to maintain teamwork. Various mergers took place in the late 1970s and 1980 in the advertising industry to enable one-stop service to the customers. In 1990, Integrated Marketing Communication became the theoretical marketing issue. According to few scholars, Integrated Marketing Communication deals with the combination among ‘the realm of marketing’ and Integrated Communication goes above advertising to add contact fields such as corporate design, public relations, and office communications.

Integrated Marketing Communication is an integrated use of advertising methods to get clarity, consistency, and high communication impact. Integrated Marketing Communication has come up as an action to gain competing edge. To develop as a promising brand, the company should deliver prepared messages to its clients and prospects send through the current marketing communication mix like public relations, advertising, personal selling, sponsorship and sales promotion. Various communication activities are unplanned and determine attitude and behavior of a customer. The activities are word-of-mouth or interpersonal communication, intrapersonal communication and intermediary communication. Any good or bad news being spread by group media or employees or any other can influence customer’s perception of a company (Blakeman, 2014).

Market Segmentation During IMC Campaign

To maintain consistency in message, the company should control product messages like durability, pricing, features, distribution network, performance, conformance, reliability, quality, and style. The product is the initial element of the marketing mix and creates a basis of contact decision. To maximize the impact of communication, the company should check customer expectation’s consistency with its service messages. Service messages are originated from contact with the company’s employee. The employees should be competent enough to meet the expectations of the consumer. The service quality is decided by the quality of staff members (Luxton, Reid &Mavondo, 2015).

Age- People belonging to all age groups use a mobile phone these days. All the young generation, middle-aged people, senior citizens are targeted for Integrated Marketing Communication campaign. 

Occupation- People from every occupation like Students, employees, businessman, homemakers, celebrities, etc., are targeted for this product.

Income- Lower Middle, Middle Class, Upper Middle class and Upper-class people are targeted for Samsung Gears.

Gender- Both Male and female are targeted to wear this gear.

Lifestyle- Aspirers, strugglers, succeeders, explorer are all focused upon to use the equipment.

All Samsung User are mostly targeted for buying Samsung Gear.

Age	Above 15 years
Gender	Male and Female
Education	Secondary school students and above
Occupation	Students, Businessman, Employee, Homemaker,
Income Class	Lower Middle, Middle Class, Upper Middle class and Upper class people are targeted for Samsung Gears
Lifestyle	Aspirers, strugglers, succeeders, explorer
Product User	Samsung

Integrated Marketing Communication does not only boost sales and profit but increases brand loyalty, brand equity, saves cost and raise the competition bar. 72 percent people favor integrated marketing approach. A successful campaign delivers messages best suited for their clients. There are various benefits of integrated marketing campaign. A long-term planning leads to a long term success. Running a marketing campaign is a long term commitment which will bring rewards. 86 percent marketing professionals agree that multiple channels under one integrated marketing strategy are essential to achieving long-term success (Young, 2014).

 A long-term nature of the campaign helps in creating brand equity and identity to make trust. When it is about marketing and advertising, customers become skeptical. By maintaining a consistent relationship with the client, a trust starts building. Well trusted brands achieve significant and loyal clients and are engaged in various activities. Marketing professionals consider clarity in messages a crucial element for customer engagement. If marketing emails are not sent correctly, it becomes difficult for the customers to understand the message. Customers will have a much clearer view if the campaign spreads a clear and unified message and the customers will react according to the brand. This element defines who the organization is and what do they do. Integrating the campaign will be more efficient. Using a variety of channels to communicate consistently will make the message more powerful. The increase in efficiency and cost-cutting will lead to increase in the revenue. Once the company decides a central message to be initiated among various channels, the campaign will be less complicated to handle. The messages should be utilized and cut down planning, meetings, and resources. Photography, content, and graphics are costly for any organization (Naeem, Bilal &Naz, 2013).

Marketing Communication Objectives

The brand awareness among the target market can be created through Direct Marketing, Public Relations, from September onwards about Samsung’s efforts of producing its smartwatch. When a company enters the competition, there are two methods to encourage growth: Intensive advertising campaign and product offerings. Samsung introduced smartwatch gear in its leading technology display all over the world. The capacity of brand building workout was not hiden. Samsung is inclined towards marketing and brand enhancing strategy by creating attention of its name and putting an enormous amount of cash in the million dollar campaign.

Samsung signed various celebrities, sportsmen, so as to influence the position of the client to buy the smartwatch gear. For instance, if a star is busy with a movie or an ad shoot, they can instantly reply to the messages on their smartwatch since they cannot carry phones everywhere. This type of advertisement campaign helped Samsung to change their buying behavior of Samsung smartwatch gear (Mihart, 2012).

Samsung has supported many sports game including Olympics showcasing their products everyday during the Olympics. There are companies which portray their product without maintaining their quality and lowering the price. However, Samsung is an exception. It not only focuses on advertisement campaigns but also keep on producing innovative products like Samsung smartwatch gear. It has positioned itself by becoming a leader in the market through innovation (Percy, 2014).

The objective of the Samsung is to target maximum audience of the media resources towards new and existing Samsung customer. Nowadays, smartphones are used by each and every age group. Samsung focuses on “Making a Better World” by utilizing a 30 second TV commercial and communicating their creative strategy. Budget allocated for the Integrated Marketing Communication campaign is $80,000 every year (Irdindia.in, 2106).

Budget Allocation	Media Tactics
$ 30,000	Television Commercial
$ 10,000	Billboards
$ 6000	YouTube
$ 4000	Twitter
$ 10,000	Prizes
$ 7000	Facebook Ads
$ 7000	Newspaper Ads
$6000	Radio Commercial

Four 30 second television commercials will be aired highlighting qualities and specifications of the Samsung Smartwatch Gear. Target A will be two Music Channels, Target B- three Movie Channels, and Target C- 3 News channel.

Billboards in highly congested areas within 25 miles of the store with Samsung logo, slogan and information will lead people to the store.

YouTube will showcase InStream ads and link to contest videos already posted on the Samsung YouTube channel.

Create a hashtag such as #Samsunggear as a way to follow the conversation about the Samsung smartwatch should be imprinted on all media relating to the video contest and encourage participation to filmmaking enthusiasts and Samsung fans on Twitter. 

IMC Budgeting and Use of Tools

Eight gift vouchers will be provided worth $500 for the participants whose video were used and $6000 for the winner of the video for a trip to Queensland, Australia (Chitty et al., 2012). 

Facebook Banner Ads will be posted on the profile of the users who have liked the Samsung Page on Facebook (Castronovo & Huang, 2012).

Samsung gear advertisement will be printed in 3 different newspapers once a week covering the entire front page of the newspaper.

Radio commercial will be same as TV advertisement including only audio of 30 seconds (Parente & Strausbaugh-Hutchinson, 2014).

Samsung website can provide its website user to book promotional offers; regardless of what whether the customer received the offer via email or direct mail they should call a representative to book such offer. Members can also book their offers online. Members can use points to avail discount on the products. Social media provide more freedom to leverage Integrated Marketing Communication strategy to create awareness and increase preference for the goods and services. Tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube can be used to connect with the audience and other web based methods to broaden the reach and minimize the cost of contacting with the people (Shimp & Andrews, 2012).

By having a grand prize drawing by organizing a promotional show, Samsung can bring in profitable customer segments. Tie-ins with companies like Pepsico, BMW, etc., can bring high end customers. These promotions help the brand in exposure or else people will not be familiar with the new innovative product. Other oriental programs like cash back vouchers. During the promotional event, the customers can give their personal information to stay updated about the latest technology being introduced in the market. This data will help in tracking, targeting and promote the brand in the long term. These data can be used in future database marketing, enhance choosing of market segments and stipulate repeat purchase and enhance client relationship management (Belch & Belch, 2016).

Another form of communication is Public Relations which is less controllable than other types of idea. Samsung can use public relations and publicity to highlight the features of Samsung gear. An active form of Public relation is press release on the innovation and allowing the press to access to this new product. This will increase more awareness of such change on magazines related to gadgets (Digitalscholarship.unlv.edu, 2016).

To decide which communication vehicle to be used, marketers need to understand not only various types of vehicle but also their pros & cons and their features of all communication vehicles. All the vehicles are interactive by one-way or two-way communication vehicle. One way communication medium gives information and creates awareness about the service, features, and benefit of the product. One way communication channel are television, radio, newspaper, and magazine. Two-way communications are the final step of the purchase process because of its interactive nature. This leads to transaction letting the customer make the buying decision (Yeshin, 2012).

Two-way communications provide benefits which are unavailable with one-way communication. The sender analyzes receiver’s understanding and asks if the receiver understands what he is saying. Also, sender spends hours to explain the entire query of receiver. Two ways communication can be direct mail, personal selling, the web, email. An interactive interface is backed by three factors; multi-way which includes two or more protagonists, spontaneous whose response pop-ups quickly and incidental whose reply of one actor follows directly & logically from the action of another.

Interactive marketing is the communication between the consumer and front-line manager. Earlier interactive communication means personal selling, but after the inception of internet, communication has begun among consumer and staff through computer, instead of face-to-face communication. One communication mix tool that can be used for a successful IMC campaign of Samsung Smartwatch gear is advertising (Digitalscholarship.unlv.edu, 2016).

Medium	Pros and Cons
Television	Ads through television reach broad segmentation of national audience. It is an expensive tool where competition is tight with the other advertisers.
Newspaper	This media reaches out to the local audience and is cheaper. But the life of a newspaper is one day.
Web	A website is customizable and can be updated anytime. But the required target market should know how to find the website and must have internet access.

Conclusion

Integrated Marketing Communication Strategy increase the capability of the branding approach to use right message using a right medium to achieve organizational goals. IMC gives the power to deliver corporate branding delivering symbolic bottom line results. Business to business companies like Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, etc., are the companies doing Integrated Marketing Communication right. The success of these companies gives evidence that Integrated Marketing Communication is a critical differentiator for success. Integrated Marketing Communication provides a significant and distinctive advantage for an organization in the form of financial report, and ability to compete at higher stages with the power Integrated Marketing Communication provides the company (Thorson & Moore, 2013).

References

(2016). Digitalscholarship.unlv.edu.Retrieved 29 September 2016, from https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1619&context=thesesdissertations

Belch, G. E., & Belch, M. A. (2016). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Elements of Integrated Marketing Communications: A Review of Research. ISBN: 10 12-3869 Vol No 4 No 1 June 2016.

Blakeman, R. (2014). Integrated marketing communication: creative strategy from idea to implementation. Rowman & Littlefield.

Castronovo, C., & Huang, L. (2012).Social media in an alternative marketing communication model. Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness, 6(1), 117.

Chitty, W., Barker, N., Valos, M., &Shimp, T. (2012).Integrated Marketing Communication, 3rd Asia Pacific ed. Cengage Learning Australia, Victoria.

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Luxton, S., Reid, M., &Mavondo, F. (2015).Integrated marketing communication capability and brand performance. Journal of Advertising,44(1), 37-46.

Mihart, C. (2012). Impact of integrated marketing communication on consumer behaviour: Effects on consumer decision-making process.International Journal of Marketing Studies, 4(2), 121.

Morrison, T. (2016).Integrated Marketing Communications.

Naeem, B., Bilal, M., &Naz, U. (2013). Integrated marketing communication: a review paper. Interdisciplinary journal of contemporary research in business, 5(5), 124-133.

Parente, D., &Strausbaugh-Hutchinson, K. (2014). Advertising campaign strategy: A guide to marketing communication plans. Cengage Learning.

Percy, L. (2014). Strategic integrated marketing communications. Routledge.

Šerić, 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.

Shimp, T. A., & Andrews, J. C. (2012). Advertising promotion and other aspects of integrated marketing communications. Cengage Learning.

Thorson, E., & Moore, J. (2013). Integrated communication: Synergy of persuasive voices. Psychology Press.

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Young, A. (2014). Brand media strategy: Integrated communications planning in the digital era. Springer.