Marketing Reading: Marketing Communications

Core Curriculum in Marketing is a series of Readings that cover fundamental course material in Marketing Management. Readings include Interactive Illustrations which help students quickly master complex concepts. This Reading is accompanied by a Teaching Note, test bank, and exhibit slides.This Reading begins with an overview of marketing communications strategy and then presents a framework for designing strategies to optimize consumer engagement. This framework offers managers three broad phases for developing a marketing communications plan: strategic intent, strategic execution, and strategic impact. Crafting such a plan ensures that coordinated and complementary messages are delivered in an integrated marketing communications plan across all consumer touch points. This Reading contains two Interactive Illustrations, Budgeting for Marketing Communications, which illustrates the objective-and-task budgeting method with a hierarchy of effects perspective, and Viral Effect of Marketing, which explores the likelihood that a shared YouTube video will go viral. The Reading also contains links to two video clips, the Taco Bell Routine Republic advertisement, a classic example of a conflict-based story, and Cracking the Code of Super Bowl Ad Effectiveness, which describes research linking viewers' brain activity to the emotional connection of effective ads. Please note: this Reading does not cover the complexity of digital marketing. Its influence on marketing communications is covered in greater depth in Core Reading: Digital Marketing (HBP No. 8224), which is a recommended pairing (assignment) with this Reading.