JUST TAKE A LOOK AT THE AMOUNT OF MOBILE USER !!! This has caused new media to overtake traditional marketing in the recent years. These tools are associated to social media, emails and videos that we may come across on a daily basis.
Do you remember the “Old Spice” commercial with its catchy tagline—”The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”? This is one of the most successful ad campaigns till date, garnering over 57 million views till date and even trumping over Obama’s victory speech on Youtube.
And that’s not all. Old Spice’s Twitter’s followers increased by a whopping 1000%, and over 600 thousand people have liked the ad on Facebook.
How did the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy achieve such exponential growth for Old Spice?
Here’s the answer—Integrated Marketing Communications. IMC is the combination and coordination of varying promotional methods, across a multitude of media channels. This reinforces the message of the campaign to target audiences and by being consistent and clear, this message reaches these audiences in the most effective way.
In Old Spice’s case, they achieved this not only by hosting their video commercial on mainstream channels for video streaming such as Youtube and Facebook, but they also delved deeper and engaged with audiences on social media.
Over a period of 24 hours, the Old Spice man responded to tweets with personalised Youtube videos. By personalising messages, not only does the brand get engagement with the target audience, they are able to build rapport with them.
With technology rapidly advancing, and the world becoming more interconnected through the Internet, social media has been an integral part of IMC. Social media encourages openness between the brand and the consumer—take Facebook for an example. Facebook allows users to like, share and comment on posts. Because of the transparency of Facebook, brands are constantly aware of the consumer’s thoughts and feedback and this can lead to an improvement in product innovation profitability.
In Old Spice’s campaign, they did not have to entice viewers with special sales or discounts—all they did was ingrain a single thought in the viewers’ minds, yet it achieved mindblowing results because they followed through the campaign and reiterated the campaign’s message through social media.
Sounds good ! IMC is not all rainbow and sunshine. In order to achieve success with IMC, the campaign message first and foremost must be powerful if not the resource and time will be wasted because while u may have the reach, your advertisement is not attractive enough for consumer to click through and ultimately purchase the products.
Now we will be talking about the cons about IMC :
- IMC takes a long time to build up but with a negative comment it can go down easily, negative comments will chase away customers from your business to your competitors. Research shows that one negative review drives away 22% of prospects, around 30 customers.
- The ROI is hard to measure. When you’re doing marketing, you definitely want to know the ROI of your campaigns to see how effective or successful it is. But unfortunately, it is difficult to measure how effective it is.
IMC is a powerful tool for both businesses and ad agencies, and has the power to make an already strong ad campaign even more powerful. By utilising IMC, not only will you have a wider reach, you will have wider engagement with your target audience and a campaign message that is more influential and impactful. What do you think about it ? Leave your comments down below and we can understand more about IMC together.
Mark Blog 
Hi Mark, to be honest I do not really know about IMC but after reading I feel that it is a powerful way to create awareness and reach your audience. However, if we are able to track the ROI accurately, is there any other way we can evaluate the effectiveness? Thanks!
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Hi Jaslyn, there are indeed other ways to track. First of all, you can track by seeing overall traffic, give you a broader, bird’s eye view of your campaign. A healthy campaign should see a slow and steady increase in traffic over time.
Secondly, we need to have a low bounce rate, a low bounce rate refers to customers staying on their page. You want visitors to spend as much time as possible on your site because the longer they stay and explore, the more likely they are to convert. All in all, ROI is the most accurate as we are able to see the full returns on investment.
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Indeed marketing is a key component of a business. With the proliferation of smartphone and applications, businesses are sure to gain from IMC. If sales is the main output of the business then yes I would definitely integrate IMC into my business. By the way, what is ROI?
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Hi Delfino! Great question! ROI = Return of investment. Return on investment represents the financial benefit received from an investment. Basically, it’s a measure of what you get back compared to what you put in. For example, you start a marketing campaign and it turn out this marketing campaign is not helpful thus you are able to understand and change the campaign. For references purpose, you can take the percentage and make comparisons for future projects.
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That is an insightful blogpost! I thoroughly enjoy OldSpice campaign as it is new information and it is more to engaging with consumers than selling their products. I believe that creativity and capturing the target market wants would be key to having a successful IMC.
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Hi Sabrina! Creativity makes the consumers engaged but I feel that practical value is the most important aspect in IMC. Let’s say the old spice video is about purchasing a goat, not all families have a farm to purchase a goat, therefore even though how creative an ad can be, eventually, the item must be practical.
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Hi Mark, well done on your blog post! It is very engaging yet informative at the same time. One of the benefits of social media marketing is the transparency that it gets. On a product/service’s page, the user is able to see both positive and negative comments, giving it legitimacy as compared to having only positive reviews, which may be perceived by some as “sketchy”/
Social media is a great tool to incorporate into IMC, but there is a saying in the media industry: “Print is not dead”. Many believe that traditional media platforms, such as newspapers and the radio still have a presence and are still relevant even with the advent of social media. How can a brand such as Old Spice, or any other brand for that matter, integrate traditional media into IMC?
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Hi Julian, yes you can add traditional media into IMC. Most adults driving to work or choose to take a cab would turn up the radio in the morning and also print newspaper is the most reliable platform for news, these two platforms would still have a substantial amount of consumers exposed to it. But the target audience must not be millenniums and more of 30s to 40s.
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