Marketing Plan on "IMC and Customer Satisfaction"

Marketing Plan 5 pages (1832 words) Sources: 4

[EXCERPT] . . . .

IMC and Customer Satisfaction

Zapper Marketing Plan

Defining Integrated Marketing Communications and Satisfaction Strategies

The Zapper's unique value proposition of mitigating and eliminating noise opens up many potential market segments and service areas. What the advertising strategy must do is not only communicate the features and benefits of the product, it must also show how effective it is in making people's lives more enjoyable. Noise is one of the most irritating types of pollution there is, often stopping people from being able to think clearly and get their work done or make effective decisions. The greatest value of the Zapper is in neutralizing these forms of noise pollution to allow people to have a more enjoyable, pleasurable experience at work or at home. The cornerstone of all effective marketing I based on creating expectations and exceeding them

(Genestre, Herbig, 1996). The Zapper must create and exceed the expectation of neutralizing harmful and irritating noise and deliver a consistently excellent customer experience (Gurau, 2008). Only by concentrating on precise, high quality production processes will the Zapper consistently meet and exceed these expectations on a consistent basis. Quality and trust of consistent performance will be the anchor points of the marketing strategy, ensuring that customers' faith and expectations of the product will be met and exceeded.

Aligning Zapper's Advertising Strategy and Alignment to Marketing Objectives

The core of the Zapper marketing strategy must be solidly set on the experiences of the customer if it is to succeed. In defining those experiences, personas, or representations of representative customers in each of the markets, will be used. These personas will explain in detail why and how noise reduction is so critically important to these people and their professions or avocations. For the hospital staff the need to mitigate noise so that greater attention and concentration can be applied to patient care is essential for professional excellence to be achieved. Personas of nurses, physicians and hospital staff will be used to more fully understand their needs. The same level of analysis and research needs to be done on each target market, as the personas' needs and requirements will drive the marketing objectives. As has been stated earlier, additional markets include libraries, in addition to homes with children and teenagers who can use the Zapper to silence a home and make it possible to enjoy music, entertainment and games more. The Zapper can be highly effective in making study times more effective and focused as well. These are all examples of creating a highly unique, differentiated customer experience.

The marketing objectives of increasing the level of awareness and trial of the Zapper in targeted markets, growing the 28 and older customer segment to 240,000 users, and creating successful Pull marketing strategies to increase sales through multichannel and omni-channels form the foundation for the company's advertising strategies. As the greatest value of this product is in the customer experience it delivers, the advertising strategy needs to stress actual customer testimonials and results over simple, feature-driven claims. The most effective marketing strategies in multichannel marketing are predicated on customer experience and trust, specifically showing how a given product delivers value beyond just its features (Mihart, 2012). Advertising strategies must resonate with truth and actual value delivered, especially in those product areas where customer experience is the differentiating factor (Hopen, 2003). For the Zapper, this translates into customer testimonials and the continual invitation to customers to create and post videos of why the Zapper is such a great product for them. Sponsoring a video context for example would get the most valuable content there is, that from actual customers.

There has never been more skepticism and doubt in marketing claims than today due to social media including bloggers willingly exposing products that are frauds. This is why trust is so powerful as a product and customer experience differentiator; it is the new currency of marketing the advertising strategy must be permeated with customer testimonials and actuals customer experiences, with as many opportunities as possible to capture their experiences as wlel. All of these aspects of the marketing strategy must also be well orchestrated across the entire IMC platform, with the specific communications platforms and channels for each specific message chosen for each type of message (Gurau, 2008). As many consumers are relying on video as a means to learn about new products, customer testimonials are needed to anchor IMC strategies in what a product is actually delivering (Ladhari, 2009). This aspect of a marketing strategy can bring greater credibility in addition to accurately setting expectations before a customer actually experiences the product.

The most important aspect of planning any marketing strategy is to realize that customers will often choose a variety of information channels to learn through as they consider a purchase. The most effective marketing strategies therefore are focused on a well-orchestrated series of strategies that can meet the diverse information and product educational needs of customers over time (Owen, Humphrey, 2009). For the Zapper this translates into the need for highly technical data for the customers who like to learn about products through very technical data. There is also the need to have very specific customer testimonials and videos as well, as many choose to learn through visual means. For the healthcare professionals there will also be the need for precise decibel reduction levels and any potential radiation the device gives off, as this could impact the performance of medical equipment as well. One of the most important part of the persona definitions mentioned earlier would also be their preferred way of learning about new products as well. All of these factors need to be taken into account when defining the advertising strategy.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Zapper will be sold using an IMC-based strategy that combines offline and online marketing channels, with specific objectives for each defined in the foundation of the overall marketing strategy. The structure of offline and online channels within IMC strategies all need to be tied to the metric of moving customers through the sales funnel (Mihart, 2012). The top funnel areas of generating awareness and interest are easily managed through the use of digital channels including websites, blogs and extensive use of marketing automation systems which capitalize on the traceable of digital content (Wolf, Wheelock, 2007). Advertising effectiveness of these strategies will be based on the increased level of awareness, interest and trial these online strategies attain. The use of offline content will also be used for driving awareness through specific marketing channels that are the most relevant to the personas that rely on printed and offline media. These include hospital administrators and hospital engineering teams who will want to have sample units to test and see if the radiation emitted affects the performance of medical products. The consumer markets will be more focused on consumer feedback and if the product is actually trustworthy or not. The approach to measuring advertising effectiveness by market will therefore be significantly different, and a varying set of metrics will be needed for each. For the consumer selling scenarios there will also need to be guarantees of performance and a very simple approach to post-sales support as well. Measuring the effectiveness of advertising strategies by segment will show which approaches are best and worst at generating awareness, increasing interest and further accentuating desire for the product Each component of the IMC strategy must contribute to the progression of prospects from awareness, to interest, desire and finally purchase. Measuring their contribution in aggregate is also critically important to determine if the mix of IMC strategy components are being optimally balanced and used (Mihart, 2012).

Defining and Implementing Zapper's Promotional Strategies

The promotional strategies will be primarily be focused on the upper funnel activities of driving higher levels of awareness and interest These will include intensive use of event marketing as was mentioned in other areas of this plan. Promotion is critically important for creating a baseline level of trust with prospects as well, and to accomplish this the Zapper will be featured at in-store demo events (Owen, Humphrey, 2009). With a product so tightly aligned to the specific experience customers have, it is essential to get as many units of the product into distribution and events as possible. This will make the product claims credible and increase the trust potential customer's have of its claimed benefits.

Research Strategy for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Of the many methodologies that are used for measuring customer satisfaction, SERVQUAL is one of the most effective in that it measures the difference between experiences and expectations (Genestre, Herbig, 1996) the research strategy for measuring customer satisfaction will concentrate on tracking the main attributes of customer satisfaction as defined through the SERVQUAL methodology, coupled with an analysis of the variations in expectations and experiences.

The specifics of this methodology include giving every customer the opportunity to the survey, and then ranking the surveys by the most and least satisfied customer's Using this approach the clustering of satisfaction segment swill also lead to the development… READ MORE

How to Reference "IMC and Customer Satisfaction" Marketing Plan in a Bibliography

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