Marketing communications

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Please improve this article if you can. (March 2008)

Marketing communications (or marcom) are messages and related media used to communicate with a market. Those who practice advertising, branding, direct marketing, graphic design, marketing, packaging, promotion, publicity, sponsorship, public relations, sales, sales promotion and online marketing are termed marketing communicators, marketing communication managers, or more briefly as marcom managers.

Traditionally, marketing communication practitioners focus on the creation and execution of printed marketing collateral; however, academic and professional research developed the practice to use strategic elements of branding and marketing in order to ensure consistency of message quast delivery throughout an organization. Many trends in business can be attributed to marketing communication; for example: the transition from customer service to customer relations, and the transition from human resources to human solutions. In branding, opportunities to contact stakeholders are called brand touchpoints (or points of contact.) Marketing communication is concerned with the general behavior of an organization and the perceptions of the organization that are promoted to stakeholders through these touchpoints.

Marketing communications is focused on product/produce/service as opposed to corporate communications where the focus of communications work is the company/enterprise itself. Marketing communications is primarily concerned with demand generation, product/produce/service positioning while corporate communications deal with issue management, mergers and acquisitions, litigation etc.

[edit] Alternative Definition

The “Marketing Communications” discipline is the employment of a mix of media vehicles that support marketing objectives.

From a domain perspective, the marketing communications discipline is viewed as an implementation function to the product marketing and corporate marketing disciplines. Marketing communications manages and employs different media vehicles in order to communicate information about the company and its products to the target audience.

The information that is conveyed is provided to marketing communications by product marketing and corporate marketing, and is designed to serve these disciplines’ respective interests. The core and most crucial form of information provided to marketing communications is referred to as “Messages”, which are ideas about the company and its products that will be communicated to the target markets.^[1]

The marketing communications discipline objectives are supported by three principal methods: advertising, graphic arts, and public relations.

The “Advertising” method, which is non-personal communication from an identified sponsor using mass media, is used to convey messages about the company and its products to the target audience.
The “Graphic Arts” method, which is the conception and copywriting of all collateral material, is responsible for maintaining a consistent image and visual positioning in the target market.
The “Public Relations” method, which are actions that promote and distribute information for a company, is focused on encouraging media coverage of the company and its products and building a virtual relationship between the company and its target audience.