Marketing Communications: A Brand Narrative Approach

Welcome to the Marketing Communications Blog and companion site for Marketing Communications: A Brand Narrative Approach. The site is a comprehensive online resource designed to provide useful supplementary materials to both lecturers and students teaching or studying Marketing Communications.

The site aims to be interactive – See the illustrative 60 page glossary explaining all current terminology and crucial communication concepts; a unique CAMPAIGN model planning framework and full component explanations; and a regular blog to encourage participation in the conversation on all the latest brand and marketing communications developments.

Campaign C A M P A2 I G N

Marketing Communications: A Brand Narrative Approach is a new text written in an engaging style intended to capture the creative magic of marketing communications campaigns as well as describing and discussing all the key concepts which underpin them.

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1.0 Current brand status

The successful application of marketing communications strategy to help achieve and maintain brand longevity has to be grounded in the company, competitive and cultural contexts within which brands are created and sustained. It is therefore important to evaluate the impact and importance of brands in relation to: existing and emerging competition in a category; the brand’s history and role in the company brand portfolio; and most importantly the creation of market meaning to brand users. 
Current brand evaluation fundamentally critiques the brand in its product/market setting.

2.0 Analysis

An in-depth situational audit of Macro and Micro environmental factors is required in order to enable sustainable brand growth, competitive parity and accurate customer profiling. Market and customer dynamics, set within local and global societal conditions, affect the marketing communication task in brand building.
Analysis of market dynamics and broader environmental factors is a pre-requisite to successful campaign planning

3.0 Marketing Communication effects and objectives

Describes the buyer states (such as brand awareness) and the specific targets (such as unprompted recall) required in order to affect the buyer behaviour of target audiences and evaluates the range of communication tools appropriate to achieving these goals.
Campaign planning therefore must first appreciate the cognitive, affective and conative behavioural domains which are to be achieved.

4.0 Planning

Planning of marketing communications requires the fully costed and accurate appropriation of the strategic and tactical elements needed to position the brand in terms of the market place and the minds of the target audience.
Planning is the framework within which marketing communications effects and objectives are to be achieved.

5.0 Application

The selection of appropriate message content and media channels in order to achieve the planned marketing communications effects and objectives requires management of effectiveness and efficiency.
The correct application of communication mix components and the accurate scheduling of appropriate media will condition the successful achievement of campaign targets.

6.0 Implementation

The practical mechanics of how marketing communication tactics will be executed in order to achieve strategy is fundamental to underpinning successful campaigns. 
The exact detailing of which target markets are selected, what messages are to be created and the correct tools to convey this is critical to the achievement of strategy

7.0 Goal evaluation

Successful marketing communications strategies need to be evaluated before during and after campaigns.
A range of quantitative and qualitative metrics can be used in order to analyse the effectiveness and efficiencies of the mix of media, message as well as evaluating the ethical, regulatory and environmental dynamics within which the organisation operates.

8.0 Next stage in brand’s development

The increasingly important imperative to provide brand longevity, reliable income streams for organisations and, more importantly, provide meaning for consumers places greater emphasis on the concept of establishing, creating and sustaining a brand narrative which parallel product life cycles. 
This approach takes the long view that all marketing communications – media and messages – are bonded in strategic and tactical dialogues and consumers co-create, disseminate and advocate all communications.