Integrated Marketing Communications for Volkswagen
Assignment: Communicate the Value: Integrated Marketing Communications Brief
Please select a brand that has a brand problem.
For example, recent player legal troubles have been a problem for the NFL brand. Another example is the Bonefish Grill, the country’s second largest seafood chain after Red Lobster. Although their check average is more than $3.00 less than Red Lobster, many consumers see the Bonefish Grill brand as “expensive”. Subway recently underwent bad publicity when Jared, their spokesperson for several years, was sent to prison on child pornography charges. Do not select Bonefish Grill, however. This is just an example.
Your company plans to outsource its entire promotional effort. Thus, you will be entertaining bids from external companies (most of which will likely be advertising agencies) who will propose that they can do your company’s integrated marketing communications (IMC) program for you. Assume that you will host a meeting at which interested companies are invited to attend. There, you will present what your company has in mind.
For this presentation, your immediate job is to develop an IMC brief. This deliverable paper will be used to instruct an external company that will be hired by your company to develop an integrated marketing communications (IMC) campaign for your company or organization.
Thus, this external company that would be bidding on the opportunity to develop your company’s IMC campaign needs information. For this reason, they would attend the meeting that you are planning. The meeting would be hosted at your company’s conference center (it seats 100 people) on Monday of the week that follows.
Your deliverable will be presented in four to five page paper and will follow APA formatting guidelines, including a cover page and reference page (Those two pages are included in the page count. Therefore, only two to three pages of actual content are needed).
Correct APA format is required. Go to http://owl.english.purdue.edu to learn more about APA format. Be sure to include a correctly formatted APA Running Header.
IMC Brief
The brief should be a concise document that answers these questions and helps guide the successful bidder’s creative team that will formulate the IMC campaign.
o What is the problem? (Define the IMC Problem that you are attempting to solve here relative to your MESSAGE?)
o What is our IMC communications objective (quantified)? (You want to have a measurable goal here. It could be to “Have 44% of your target audience recognize that ‘Tide Liquid gets stains out best’” and to accomplish this by September 30th, 2016, for the promotional campaign that commences 1 July2016.)
o Who are we trying to reach? What are the characteristics of the target market? (Describe your target market using segmentation variables, just as you were asked to do in your IMC Plan outline in Week FOUR – age, income, education, etc., and geography and/or other appropriate segmentation variables. Demonstrate application of what you learned in Week TWO.)
o What is the most persuasive idea we want to convey? (This can be part of the message.)
o What creative guidelines do we have to consider (e.g., logo, font, corporate colors)? (You make the decision here.)
o What timeframe are we looking at for development and delivery? (This is the window that you will utilize for development… and then the actual delivery of the IMC promotional effort. You need to insert dates here.)