Integrated Marketing Communication Samsung Samples for Students

Question: Discuss about the Integrated Marketing Communication. Answer: Marketing Communication of Samsung In the era of globalisation, the large scale companies like Samsung has to adopt some of the marketing tactics which helps in building communication between the business and the consumers. Integrated marketing communication helps Samsung in developing the strategic marketing process and ensuring its success in establishing communication with the customer. Samsung faced the explosion of battery scenario which hampered its brand image. To restore its brand value and equity, the company is using some marketing techniques (Brindha, 2014). The current marketing techniques used by Samsung are: Marketing communication mix of Samsung Advertising: Samsung is one of the leaders in the telecommunication devices industry. The brand uses attractive advertising techniques and ideas to create an interest in the target consumers. Advertisements are created by keeping the thoughts, culture, demographics and behaviour of customers in mind. Advertisements establish an on direct kind of communication between the company and the users. Samsung always tries to come up with latest techniques and features in its products which are highlighted in its advertisements either in print media or digital media (Brindha, 2014). Sales Promotion: Sales promotion is the technique which is used to boost sales of Samsung phone sets. The company often uses the sales promotion tactics like Buy Handset and get talk value free or win a trip to XYZ, etc. This encourages the customers to buy more in the greed of gifts and prizes. The customers feel more valued and powerful and the company gets successful in levelling up their sales. Sales promotion helps the brand in boosting up the sales in a short period of time. Social media: Social media is the latest trend of establishing communication. It is communicating through the social media platforms. Samsung has excellent presence on Facebook, twitter and other social media platforms where it uses tactics to communicate with the masses. For e.g. Samsung keeps on posting about the latest contests and latest offerings of the brand on Facebook and this helps in promoting the offerings of the brand (Mihart, 2012). Events: Marketers are creative and they always have to think out of the box. The marketers of Samsung are always in an attempt to create something new which creates interest in the people for the brand. Samsung often takes parts in famous, world class events which help in establishing communication with the masses. For e.g. Samsung sponsors the world level sports events, music events, etc. where the visibility of brand increases (Mihart, 2012). Samsungs Brand Image and Consumer Brand Awareness Building a good brand image has become a challenging task in the present global competitive environment. Samsung has positioned its brand successfully in the markets but has to face a tough competition with other brands like Apple, Sony, Motorola and more. As per Samsung (2017), their vision in 2020 is to inspire the World and create the Future. This shows that Samsung is placing its brand as the innovative and creative world to present something new always to its customers. Since its inception, it has been among the world leaders of telecommunication handsets and aims to deliver quality products to its customers. As per Jain (2017), Samsung and Apple are the two big leaders in the Smartphone industry and Samsung holds 21% of the market share. Samsung launched many successful smart phones in market like Galaxy S7, Note 7 and many more but as soon as the news of explosion of Note 7 models came up, the brand has to recall the handsets and its damaged the brand image of the company. Despite the huge brand loss, Samsung was able to make good number of sales because of its strong market presence. The company is continuously trying to recover its brand image and to make a terrific comeback. For measuring the brand equity, a customer based brand equity Model has been designed by Kevin Lane Keller. Figure 1: Customer Based Equity Model As per this model, this is a framework which creates a blueprint for the strong brands. Samsung brand equity and brand awareness can be measured through this pyramid (Keller, Parameswaran, and Jacob, 2011). The model says that building a strong brand includes four steps which are: Establishing the brand identity of SamsungDeveloping the meaning of the brandGetting the positive responses for the brandInvolving brand with the customer relationships (Fayrene and Lee, 2011). By following these steps, Samsung establish six brand blocks which are Brand Salience, Brand performance, Brand imagery, brand judgements, brand feelings and brand resonance. Brand resonance is achieved when all the other brand building blocks are achieved. This shows that the customers are highly loyal towards Samsung. The model works successfully when the planning and implementation of the strategies of brand is done effectively (Fayrene and Lee, 2011). Samsung has such a strong brand image in Australia and across the world that it dominates the markets and gets loyalty from the customers. As per the report from Brand Finance (2012), Samsung is among the top 10 most valuable brands. This shows the credibility and equity of the brand. Samsungs Brand Meaning Samsung is the brand well known by everyone. The brand belongs to Korea where the brand name means Three Starts or Tri stars. The name is purely Korean. These three starts were also reflected in the logo of the company till the year 1992. It shows that the brand is powerful like starts are in the sky. Samsung is the big brand around the world which keeps quality and customers needs as its core features. Samsung has adopted the concept of New Management in 1993 and since then, the company has gathered huge success. Too ensure the high quality of the products, the brand produce Smartphone handsets in its own factories. There are more than 80 countries in which the company operates and earned more than $180 billion of revenue in 2012 which is expected to grow at $400 billion in the year 2020. The company has a competitive edge because of its Research and Development activities (Samsung Newsroom, 2017) Figure 2: The evolution of the brand logo of Samsung Source: (Victor, 2014) The company also won many awards for its designs and innovations. The company has a main focus on the customers delights and insights. Samsung Galaxy smart phone was the perfect example of it. The company also works for sustainability of future. It looks forward, invest in latest technologies and care for environment. The products of Samsung receive global standard environmental certifications. It has already invested more than $5 billion in the years 2009-2013 to minimise the emissions of greenhouse gases (Jain, 2017). The name Samsung was chosen by its founder Lee Byung- chull because he had a vision to make company big and powerful like starts in the sky. The company is No. 1 in smart phones and aims at delivering best experience to the consumers. The sales of the company began to increase when it launched Galaxy series of smart phones. The brand believes that technology can change the world for the better. There are infinite numbers of ideas which can be put into application for betterment of people. Technology can open doors for new possibilities (Samsung Newsroom, 2017). Current IMC approach to brand enhancement As already discussed Integrated Marketing Communication is the usage of tools like advertising, social media marketing, sales promotion, etc. Samsung use these tools to effectively communicate with its consumers and communicate the brand to them. The main goals of Integrated Marketing Communication are to create buzz about the brand, to maintain relationship with the customers, to increase awareness for the brand and to drive sales (Kitchen and Burgmann, 2010). The approaches used by Samsung are defining its Unique Selling proposition through various approaches like Print advertisements in newspapers and magazines, through events like sports events, music events, award functions, exhibitions, etc. the company sponsored big events like London Olympic games 2012 to gain popularity from the masses. The company uses celebrities to endorse its products. It helps in making connection between the consumer and the brand. Celebrities add glamour to the product which helps in attracting most o f the consumers. It also makes people aware about the brand (Yeshin, 2012). The company is also using social media to attract target customers. Social media is continuously gaining popularity and have mass population coverage. The social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Google plus have millions of users which can be approached through social media marketing. Internet is a powerful tool through which the customers and the brand can easily connect with each other. The company runs many creative advertisement campaigns to enhance its brand image among the target consumers (Shimp and Andrews, 2012). The company also adopts the approach of Public relationship in which it personally connect with the customers by taking their opinions and views about the brand. The company send direct emails to individual customer to make them feel privileged. It also enhances its brand image by adopting many sales promotion techniques like discounts, free vouchers or gifts. It can be concluded that the brand uses the appropriate mix of the approaches of marketing communication so that effective communication can be established between the consumers and the company and brand image can be enhanced. References Brand Finance, 2012, BrandFinance Australian Top 30. Retrieved from https://brandfinance.com/images/upload/brandfinance_australia_top_30_final_single_page.pdf Brindha, G 2014, Integrated Marketing Communication Strategies of Apple and Samsung, International Journal of Research and Development - A Management Review (IJRDMR). Fayrene, C Y and Lee, G C, 2011, Customer-based brand equity: A literature review,Researchers World,2(1), p.33. Jain, H 2017, Will Samsung Be Able to Repair Its Brand Image?, NASDAQ. Keller, K L, Parameswaran, M G and Jacob, I, 2011,Strategic brand management: Building, measuring, and managing brand equity, Pearson Education India. Kitchen, P.J. and Burgmann, I., 2010.Integrated marketing communication. John Wiley Sons, Ltd. Mihart, C, 2012, Impact of integrated marketing communication on consumer behaviour: effects on consumer decisionmaking process,International Journal of Marketing Studies,4(2), p.121. Samsung Newsroom, 2017, 20 Things You Didnt Know about Samsung, Samsung. Samsung, 2017, About Us, Samsung. Retrieved from https://www.samsung.com/au/aboutsamsung/. Shimp, T A and Andrews, J C, 2012, Advertising promotion and other aspects of integrated marketing communications, Cengage Learning. Victor, H 2014, The hidden meaning behind the names of tech giants: what does Samsung mean?, Phonearena.com. Yeshin, T., 2012,Integrated marketing communications, Routledge.