An investigation into integrated marketing communications

and its impact on small businesses.

Any type of profit-oriented organisations’ objective is to be sustainable and to

make profit. Accurate business management can support this. Being an effective
manager involves skills such as organizing, planning, staffing, leading and
controlling. Functional organisation structure understanding (production, human
resources, purchasing, finance, research and development and sales and
marketing) is also vital in assisting the decision-making process (Armstrong 2001,
p.11,13). By not being able to comprehend those basics or apply them in real life
scenarios, small business owners may be placed under additional pressure as
frequently limited financial resources and lack of scientific managerial background
may expose their weaknesses in crisis situations leading to a business death.

Leventhal (2005) notices that marketing – driven organisations’ advantage is that

they can understand the market and consumers’ needs better. This enables the
business strategy to be altered when needed and accurate product development to
be implemented when necessary thus allowing the business to profit from the
ability to adjust to current market needs efficiently. Furthermore, marketing is
“the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying
customer requirements profitably” (Chartered Institute of Marketing, 2017).
According to The London School of Economics (LSE) 2016, it covers activities such
as advertising, community involvement, customer service, direct marketing,
distribution, market research, media planning, product pricing, public relations and
sales.
Such a wide scope of actions to be considered by a manager (in a small business
frequently the owner) may be problematic due to the complexity that it involves,
time management, other responsibilities and costs.

The Office for National Statistics (2015) recorded the birth rate of companies
specialising in management consultancy as the highest. This may suggest that
businesses attempt to support their managerial activities by outsourcing
consultancy. It may be reasonable for a small business to focus on its core activities
such as production or services they provide instead of trying to tackle frequently
complex and time-consuming market research. These statistics may also suggest
that businesses start to notice the significance of consultancy and the role it plays
ensuring organisation’s sustainability and competitiveness.

The Brexit vote in 2016 brought a change in business environment in the UK. The
first repercussion to happen because of that was a dramatic fall in the value of the
pound against other major currencies such as USD and EUR (Stooq, 2017) of around
10%. Initially, for UK business, it was considered as a positive because it made
British business more competitive as the goods manufactured in the UK became
more affordable to purchase overseas. On the other hand, the costs of food and
those raw materials such as crude oil, steel etc. purchased abroad necessary to
sustain home production and satisfy the demand, began to soar which led to
inflation peaking at 3% (Bank of England, 2017).

Businesses therefore, begin to search for alternative methods of improving their

financial performance. One of them is cost reduction although, as Fill (2009, p.275)
explains, one of the ways of increasing organisation’s efficiency is integration of
business related activities. As an example, Integrated Marketing Communications
(IMC) can bring profit relatively quickly and at the same time benefit a business
over the prolonged period of time. He later suggests that organisations should
therefore, switch from transaction - based marketing to managing the relationship
with the customers in order to enable the ground for implementing and managing
the IMC. Furthermore, this relationship between the business and the
customer/consumer may constitute the core of the long lasting loyalty. In his
opinion, not only providing customers with what they want but also by examining
and understanding their values, building and sustaining the trust in the company as
well as loyalty towards the customers, falls within the concept of brand
relationship.

An example of the importance of brand loyalty for a business is Costa Coffee (part
of Whitbread PLC Group). It cooperates with an online feedback platform provider,
an external company called Clarabridge Studio. The online survey asks the selected
group of people (Costa Coffee Club Card registered owners) about the quality of
the experience during a visit in a coffee shop. Based on the questionnaire the
report generates a percentage showing the likelihood of the customers returning to
a Costa Coffee Shop again. The report indicates which of the aspects of the
business are appealing to the customers and which ones need to be improved, what
satisfies and dissatisfies them. The information gathered may suggest managers
what particular actions need to take place in order to meet the customers’
expectations as well as ensuring that the company’s targets are met. Customers’
feedback is taken extremely seriously; in certain situations even disciplinary
actions may take place against the individuals concerned.
Therefore, as explained previously, the importance of building a relationship
between the customers and businesses does not only rely on the speed of service,
product accessibility and the price of goods. Factors such as the atmosphere,
friendliness, employees’ ability to build a relationship with customers with
different characteristics becomes more important for businesses. Retaining
customers is cheaper than finding new ones from the marketing science
perspective.

An example of the supreme synchronisation of external marketing communications

is Coca–Cola. This company emits multiple message to its customers from different
angles / different platforms ensuring their consistency and clarity of meaning and
appeal at every stage of the campaign. Coca-Cola marketing communications
present an exceptional approach towards it. Their campaigns employ various
channels of communication including social media, cooperation with Apple store,
events sponsorship and most recently - computer game industry.

Turnbull (2016) explains that the key to the success in IMC is the planning and
execution of the campaign. IMC plan consists of the following elements: (S) current
situation analysis, (O) setting the campaign objectives, (S) choosing the strategy,
(T) deciding which tactics to employ to reach strategy objectives, (A) action plan
and monitoring (C) (Taylor and Smith, 2004). By having a plan of actions businesses
create a structure of activities to be taken. The above model called SOSTAC has its
advantages as well as disadvantages nevertheless it has been viewed as one of the
most comprehensive modern approach to marketing (World Press, n.d.).
According to Turnbull (2016) its advantages are:
- cost reduction, providing more effective communications,
- supports more accurate product or service positioning and targeting,
- enables greater coordination and control over the project both financial as
well as allocation of labour, division of labour and therefore greater
responsibility potentially leading to increased motivation amongst
employees,
- planning enables monitoring and control, key performance indicators (KPI)
are defined therefore managers have a tool allowing them to review the
whole process and its success rate,
- supports the change process within organisations (from transaction – based
to relationship – based)
- future communication campaigns can be developed on the accomplished
promotional activities,
- may reduce the dependency of outsourcing specialist agencies enabling
further cost reduction
Disadvantages are as follows:
- increased risk of centralisation of the decision making process and
monitoring,
- the process involves various internal organisation stakeholders such as
teams, line managers etc. whose various experiences and point of view may
affect the productivity, proposal acceptance and morale,
- potential risk to creativity as single messages and standardisation increases,
- globalisation of the communications campaign may restrict the appeal of the
message sent to the local market,
- resistance to change from the employees if such model of organising work
was not being utilised in a company before,
- in case of a failure of the project due to e.g. poor management, there may
be a serious negative brand image and staffing consequences to the
company,
- possible poor quality of the project due to lack of all the necessary
information (marketing intelligence).
The external business environment such as legislation, EU – UK political relationship
following the Brexit vote and its future outcomes, inflation, interest rates,
currency fluctuations etc. upon which a small UK company has none to very little
impact, are a constant affecting companies from similar trades to a comparable
extent. In majority of instances those factors cannot be predicted. On the other
hand companies have an opportunity to utilise most recent humans’ thought
developments and other’s experience which may increase the organisations’ ability
to withstand uncertain times and develop a level of resilience giving themselves
not only a greater chance to survive but to gain a competitive advantage over their
competitors. As Turnbull (2016, p.333) states, IMC is not a cure for all the problems
a company may experience however, it creates a need to recognise that
organisations should pursue integration of the general direction in which they want
to continue to operate. There are risks of implementing a change within
organisations, such as staff resilience to do things differently to what they were
used to. The question is whether the need to embrace the change in order to
survive is greater than the risk of falling behind with the competitors and
ultimately losing the job creating even greater uncertainty.
 Bibliography

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FILL, C., 2009. Marketing communications : interactivity, communities and
content. 5th ed. Harlow: FT, Prentice Hall
LEVENTHAL, R.C., 2005. The importance of marketing. Strategic Direction, 21(6),
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THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, 2006. Companies Act 2006.
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