What does Marketing Communications Mean?

Marketing communications is the art of understanding various forms of marketing and advertising mediums and using it to communicate a message to potential clients or customers. Also called MarCon or Integrated Marketing Communications (ICM), marketing communications is the ability to gather and assess information to gain insight into the wants and needs of a specific target market. Then, using that gathered information, constructing and communicating messages that would affect the target audience most effectively would be the next step.

Essentially, marketing communications strategies are a most powerful form of persuasion. Using various media forms including press releases and other media advertising, Internet marketing and Google ads among other forms of marketing and advertising, to send a message to consumers is a complex but powerful way to promote a product, business or service, not to mention bolster the reputation of the same if used in the right way.

Marketing Communications is another form of public relations. Using the good qualities of an organisation or changing the bad and then portraying that organisation in a favourable light can help sway the public opinion about an organisation. Using marketing communications is the best way of completing this task. Using the demographics of a target audience and constructing the marketing and advertising to reflect what the public wants to see can instantly make or break an organisation.

The ability to determine what the consumer or the public wants form a product or service is a powerful one. Not only can those who work in the field of marketing communication study the preferences and behaviour of the consumers and understand what they want, but the specialists know why they want to see and hear specific traits of a product. Then combining these statistics with the usual demographics gathered, the marketing communications worker could easily determine what the public needs to hear or see for a product to sell.

After determining this information, the marketing communications specialist creates a specific message for the target audience to hear that will portray the product in the exact way the public needs to see it, therefore swaying the public opinion of the product and persuading them to purchase the product or service.

History denotes that Sigmund Freud initially determined how to go about the task of swaying the public opinion. The original marketing techniques targeted homemakers who were more apt to watch television during the day. The marketing communications specialists of that era, using cues form Freud, constructed “subliminal” messages into television advertisements that essentially told the women what they wanted to purchase; they just “had to have the product.” For example, Ford automobiles and cigarettes were heavily targeted at women on the 1950’s in this manner, using Freud’s techniques.

Marketing communications has come a long way since the 1950’s. More recently, the marketing communications specialists can simply watch what a person does on the internet or how he responds to certain questions and use that information to determine how best to target them and with what kind of message to send.