Search results

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s activity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the average recipient associates marketing with advertising, competitions and leaflets about new promotions delivered to houses or offices. Advertising, especially Internet advertising, is one of the most effective forms of marketing and one of the fastest developing areas of business. New channels of communication are emerging all the time – the Internet, digital television, mobile telephony; accompanied by new forms, such as the so-called ambient media. Advertising benefits from the achievements of many fields of science, that is, psychology, sociology, statistics, medicine and economics. At the same time, it combines science and the arts – it requires both knowledge and intuition. Contemporary advertising has different forms and areas of activity; yet it is always closely linked with the operations of a company – it is a form of marketing communication.

The indices of marketing communication presented in this chapter are generally known and used not only by advertising agencies but also by the marketing departments of many organisations. Brand awareness, advertising scope and frequency, the penetration index or the response rate belong to the most widely used indices; others, like the conversion rate or the affinity index, will get increasingly more significant along with the process of professionalisation of the environment of marketing specialists in Poland and with increased pressure on measuring marketing activities. Marketing indices are used for not only planning activities, but also their evaluation; some of them, such as telemarketing, mailing and coupons, provide an extensive array of possibilities of performance evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the essential components of a brand metrics strategy and application of brand scorecard as an integrated approach to measure the overall performance of brands. Tools for brand performance measurement are integrated by firms into brand measurement systems, with new models for prioritizing the factors of brand influence introduced continuously. Hence, brands need to be periodically measured in terms of the impact on consumers, stimulating market demand, sustaining seasonality effects and exploring opportunities for proliferation.

This paper determines the essential components of a brand metrics strategy conceptualizing the inter‐dependence of “Five‐A” factors which include awareness, acquaintance, association, allegiance and appraisal to measure the performance of brands. The application of a brand scorecard process as an integrated approach to measure the overall performance of brands is also discussed, explaining how different constituents of metrics can be linked to business performance.

Brand metrics are considered to be effective tools for measuring the qualitative parameters of brand performance in a given market and time, allowing the firm to measure the effectiveness of brand‐building activity in reference to brand investment (financial inputs) and brand impact (growth outputs) in the business. It is also argued in the paper that brand management is not just a marketing issue; it also directly affects corporate profitability. Effective brand portfolio management starts by creating a fact base about the equity in each brand and the brand's economic contribution.

An effective brand measurement system helps businesses to understand how the brand is performing with the framework of customer values and against competing brands. This is a simple and effective tool of measuring brand performance in the market woven around the principle of pooling quantitative variables in various combinations in the metrics. It is important for a firm to understand relationships between brand perception, brand performance and financial impact, to work within the brand metrics process.

Application of brand metrics and brand scorecard would be useful for the managers to conduct analysis of brand metrics for mapping yield‐loss score in reference to brands gained versus brands lost. The metrics tools help in measuring the impact of various market drivers such as demand, consumer preferences, retail sales, brand promotion, price sensitivity, product attributes, trial effects and repeat purchase behavior of consumers on the performance of brands.

Brand metrics is a new concept and plays a major role in measuring the performance of brand in the market and applications of brand scorecard helps the process of determining the brand yield.

The objective of this paper is to investigate IMC metrics in the lens of an institution-wide change management process, and to do so, the authors develop and test an organizational data quality enhancement model.

Qualitative research was conducted, with a follow-on quantitative pre-test. A subsequent, larger-scale quantitative survey resulted in a total of 128 responses, 124 useable. A regression analysis was conducted using the factor scores of the six organizational dimensions as independent variables and overall data quality as the dependent variable.

The findings show that overcoming poor IMC data quality requires a corporate culture that reduces cross-functional and departmental divides. The authors also support the idea that horizontally organized learning organizations not only have superior IMC data, but they also achieve higher rates of return on their cross-platform IMC efforts.

The research has limitations in terms of substantive generalizability, since it focuses on one industry within the USA. Future research can expand to other industries and expand to a global setting in order to replicate these findings.

Most improvement seems to be needed in the area of sharing customer data. The findings provide a signal to marketing organizations that want to connect with their customers that data quality must be a strategic priority, with appropriate processes in place to manage data at every touch point.

Research is needed that establishes effective methods for measuring the success of data-driven communication efforts to support management.

How can customer service be so bad in an era when companies collect endless data on customer interactions? The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the important challenge of elevating customer service delivery by providing guidelines for when and how to select optimal measures of customer service measurement using a new decision framework.

The paper uses a comprehensive, multi-dimensional review of extant literature related to customer service, journey mapping and performance measurement and applied a qualitative, taxonomic approach for model development.

A process model and customer journey mapping framework can facilitate the selection and application of appropriate and relevant customer service experience metrics to enhance customer service experience strategies, creation and delivery.

The taxonomy of customer service metrics is limited to current publicly and commercially available metrics. The dynamic nature of the customer service environment necessitates continuous updates of the model and framework.

Selection of customer service performance measures should match relevant stages of the customer journey; use perception-based, operational and outcome-based metrics that track employee and customer behaviours; improve omni-channel measurement; and integrate data-sharing and benchmark measurement initiatives through collaboration with customer service communities.

A reimagined perspective is offered to the complex challenge of measuring and improving customer service, providing a new decision-making framework for customer service experience measurement and guidance for future research.

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is regarded as an important marketing management issue because of increasingly dynamic market conditions, and the impact that this dynamism is having on the effectiveness of traditional marketing communications tools and planning approaches. IMC relates to me strategic management of marketing communications to achieve superior brand performance. This paper uses that Integrated Marketing Audit (Duncan and Moriarty, 1997) as a mechanism to analyse the degree of integration of marketing communications management and link this to measures of brand performance. The research employs the Australian and New Zealand wine industries as a context to consider this relationship. Analysis suggests that a higher degree of integration in marketing communications management results in better brand performance. As a result, managers of wine brands should consider how to adopt IMC principles and review their management of marketing communications.

Despite many years of academic research into organisational integration and effectiveness, organisations still struggle to successfully implement strategy and achieve competitive advantage. However, the rapid evolution of marketing technologies such as big data, marketing analytics, artificial intelligence and personalised consumer interactions offer potential for an integrated marketing communication technological capability that aligns and integrates an organisation. Programmatic advertising is one such integrated marketing communication (IMC) technology capability, applying and learning from customer information and behaviours to align and integrate organisational activity. The literature on programmatic is embryonic and a conceptual framework that links its potential to organisational effectiveness is timely. This paper aims to develop a framework showing the potential for programmatic advertising as an IMC technology capability to enhance organisational integration and performance.

An exploratory methodology gained insight from 15 depth interviews with senior marketing executives from both organisations and external advertising agencies.

Four elements of a programmatic integrated organisation were identified and aligned with seven marketing activity levers to deliver firm performance measures.

This research contributes to theory, affirming IMC as a capability and positioning programmatic as a means of organisational integration.

The model also offers guidance for practitioners looking to integrate programmatic into their organisation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to look at programmatic from an IMC perspective and as a means of organisational integration. It is also the first to apply Moorman and Day’s (2016) model to explore organisational integration and programmatic, developing a new model, specifically contextualised for programmatic advertising.

This chapter integrates research that highlights and demonstrates the importance of the marketing mix and customer attitudinal metrics in influencing the customer’s path to purchase. A key objective of this chapter is the provision of an integrative conceptual framework that links marketing actions to customer mindset metrics along the consumer’s path to purchase and the identification of the mechanisms by which customer mindset metrics contribute to consumer purchase journey. Specifically, it delineates two routes for the effects to manifest on sales: the “mindset route” where marketing actions influence customer mindset metrics, which in turn influence brand performance, or the “transactions route” where marketing actions influence market performance directly without influencing the intermediate mindset metrics. A second objective is to identify empirical patterns on incorporating marketing mix and mindset metrics along the path to purchase by reviewing key papers in this domain. Finally, the chapter concludes with the formulation of a rich, forward-looking research agenda on the customer mindset metrics – path to purchase link.

This paper aims to elaborate on the concept of “integrated marketing communication (IMC) practice” and provide an empirical exposition of how integration is enacted in the lifeworlds of marketing practitioners, drawing from the “practice turn” in management studies. Although IMC is a well-known conceptual idea in academia, there is insufficient theorisation of what it means “to do” IMC. Despite broad acceptance for IMC, there has been scant application of available organisational and sociological theories to illuminate actual IMC practices in the field.

The paper introduces practice theory as a lens through which to study and analyse IMC practices. Using qualitative coding and interpretative analysis, the framework was operationalised and applied to a two-year organisational ethnography encompassing IMC planning activities in at a leading Swedish retailer.

Findings demonstrate how practitioners develop explicit and implicit strategies to enact strategic integration. The study conceptualises IMC as a set of interrelated practices, or routinised behaviours, which are repeated and organised by some social or formal rules and conventions. In the ethnographic context of the study, “IMC as practice” is exhibited in the forms of routines, material set-ups, rules and procedures, cultural templates and teleoaffective structures.

The paper proposes a novel set of theoretical and methodological tools that can be used to understand how IMC lives as a set of practices inside organisations. It specifically conceptualises the link between mental and objectified, materialised and routinised activities that has previously been escaping the sphere of theorisation. By creating language and tools to capture hitherto unmodellable phenomena, the paper opens many new avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unique overview of business-to-business (B2B) companies engagement with and strategic approach to use of social media in brand building. This research complements the much more extensive knowledge base regarding social media use in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts.

Since social media marketing is a relatively new activity for B2B companies an interpretivist stance that is inductive in nature is adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with marketing professionals involved in managing social media programmes in France, Ireland, the UK and the USA.

The study found that the level of enagement with social media marketing varied, as summarised in the B2B Social Media Engagement Taxonomy. Enhancing brand image, extending brand awareness and facilitating customer engagement were the most common social media objectives. There was no evidence to suggest that companies saw social media as heralding a paradigm shift in brand management and control of the kind discussed and experienced in B2C social media contexts. The B2B social media strategy framework is proposed; this identifies the following six components of a social media strategy: monitoring and listening, empowering and enagaging employees, creating compelling content, stimulating electronic word of mouth, evaluating and selecting channels, and enhacning brand presence through integrating social media.

The research contributes to the knowledge base associated with social media marketing by offering insights into and a framework summarising B2B social media strategy.