Week 14: Steps in Effective Marketing Communication
Learning objectives
- Walk through the steps in developing effective marketing communication.
- Identify audience, message, media, and feedback carefully.
- Spot noise and decoding problems in real campaigns.
Effective communication is engineered, not accidental. A standard sequence (aligned with principles texts) looks like this:
- Identify the target audience — Current users, potential buyers, influencers, or publics? Audience profile shapes everything later.
- Determine communication objectives — Awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, purchase (hierarchy-of-effects thinking).
- Design the message — Content (rational, emotional, moral appeals), structure, and format. Message strategy answers what to say; creative strategy answers how to say it.
- Select communication channels / media — Personal vs non-personal channels; media types and vehicles; timing.
- Select message source — Credibility: expertise, trustworthiness, likability. Wrong endorser means wrong decode.
- Collect feedback — Did the audience see, recall, like, believe, and act? Feedback closes the loop for IMC learning.
Throughout, remember the communication model: sender → encoding → message/media → decoding → receiver, with noise and feedback loops. Cultural noise is common when campaigns are copied across regions without adaptation.
Pakistan example
A financial literacy campaign for first-time female students should encode in accessible language, choose trusted campus or community sources, and measure feedback beyond vanity metrics (likes) — e.g., workshop sign-ups or app installs with completed onboarding.
Key terms
- Encoding
- Putting thought into symbolic form (words, images, sounds).
- Decoding
- Receiver assigning meaning to the symbols.
- Noise
- Unplanned static or distortion during the communication process.
- Hierarchy of effects
- Stages consumers often pass through from awareness to purchase.
Self-check
- Write a communication objective that is measurable for a new campus brand.
- How can an influencer become noise rather than a credible source?
- Why measure feedback beyond reach and impressions?
- Give an example of encoding/decoding mismatch across languages or cultures.