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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.

Relationship marketing is not effective in every situation or context. This study investigates the impact of three categories of potential contingency factors on the effectiveness of relationship marketing efforts in a retail services context: demographic characteristics of the consumer (age and gender), personal values of the consumer (social affiliation), and shopping-related consumer characteristics (product category involvement, consumer relationship proneness, and shopping enjoyment). The data relate to more than 1,700 mall intercept personal interviews conducted in the United States, and in two western European countries (the Netherlands and Belgium), covering a wide variety of food and apparel retailers. The found moderating influences were inconsistent across samples, stressing the need for an adapted relationship marketing strategy per country and industry. The results do provide a first indication that relationship marketing efforts are relatively more effective if they are directed at consumers who are young and female, have a high need for social affiliation, and show high levels of product category involvement, consumer relationship proneness, and shopping enjoyment. The results provide a preliminary framework for retailers to optimize the allocation of their relationship marketing budgets.

This chapter analyses the marketing management practices for the video games industry in Turkey. To identify the extended value chains and define the critical success factors in this local environment, we invited the members of OYUNDER – Game Developers, Designers and Publishers Association in Turkey – to participate in an online survey. The following three main research questions guided this survey: (1) How video game developer companies resolve marketing decisions, decide on their marketing mix and create marketing plans; (2) how they perceive the importance given to marketing in their industry and (3) how they measure and judge the success of their marketing activities. Results indicate that Turkish video game developers are predominantly male and young. They organise and work in small teams. They lack marketing planning as indicated by actualised versus expected revenues and marketing spendings. Only 23.7% of the participants report employing marketing-related staff and their opinions of marketing-related business partners – such as advertising and PR agencies – are negative due to these institutions’ perceived lack of industry experience. The developers mainly use social media channels and digital advertising for their marketing needs. Above-the-line advertising is the least used channel, with content, influencer and below-the-line marketing channels ranging in the middle. They report confidence in managing campaigns for social media, digital marketing and content marketing. However, they believe that they lack the skills to manage above-the-line and below-the-line marketing activities, reporting lack of capital and human resources as the main barriers. Although they believe that marketing can help them reach new customers, they are also afraid to take risks and admit to being conservative in marketing practices.

The study here helps to fill the gap between the current practices of management performance audits for firms and government agencies. The study advances recent theories of program evaluation and marketing management auditing. While the application in this chapter refers to government agencies managing destination marketing programs (tourism agencies), the algorithmic model construction is applicable for all management audits. The study applies the perspectives from two streams of theory to describe five relevant activities for managing destination marketing programs: scanning, planning, implementation, assessing, and administering. The analysis proposes impact assessments to improve management performances of DMOs via checklists for assessing the quality of information in tourism-management performance audits. Checklists can serve as a management tool by management performance auditors and by DMO executives to enhance the quality in executing destination marketing programs. A meta-evaluation of 10 tourism management audit reports identifies good and bad practices. The findings indicate that substantial improvements are possible in the practice of DMO’s management performance auditing, and the proposed checklist may ensure both high quality performance audit reports and improved performances in DMO practices.

Although scientific methods are available for evaluating the impact of intervention programs (e.g., plant growth of alternative seeds and soil treatments; consumer purchases of alternative prices, brands, and products; reforms such as regulations requiring wearing helmets by motorcycle riders), tourism marketing programs fail to use these methods. Traditional “conversion studies” – estimating the rate inquiries from tourism advertising convert into visitors by asking samples of inquirers if they visited – have fatal flaws in measuring whether or not the advertising caused visits to the destination that otherwise would not have occurred. The failure to stop doing traditional conversion studies to measure whether or not advertising causes visits appears to be an example of ignorance of ignorance, that is, tourism marketing executives do not have the knowledge and skills for applying effective methods to estimate the effectiveness of marketing and advertising's influence on causing visits, and they are unaware of their ignorance. What to do? New technologies in delivering advertising is decreasing the costs and efforts of using scientific methods for measuring advertising and marketing's impact on visits. Large, unobtrusive, scientific field experiments are appearing in the literature in the second decade of the 21st century. Good news at last?

This chapter presents a systematic review of over 30 types of online marketing methods. It describes different methods like email marketing, social network marketing, in-game marketing and augmented reality marketing, among other approaches. The researchers discuss that the rationale for using these online marketing strategies is to increase brand awareness, customer-centric marketing and consumer loyalty. They shed light on various personalization methods including recommendation systems and user-generated content in their taxonomy of online marketing terms. Hence, they explain how these online marketing methods are related to each other. The researchers contend that the boundaries between online marketing methods have not been clarified enough within the academic literature. Therefore, this chapter provides a better understanding of different online marketing methods. A review of the literature suggests that the “oldest” online marketing methods including the email and the websites are still very relevant for today’s corporate communication. In conclusion, the researchers put forward their recommendations for future research about contemporary online marketing methods.