After the marketer has facilitated all the other marketing mix variables, they are ready to communicate with their intended target audience. Marketers have a set of promotional methods for communicating. This chapter explores the various methods of communication along with modeling the communication process.
Throughout the chapter we explore the various promotional methods: advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and internet and digital marketing. The communication process has multiple steps: sender, receivers, message, medium, encoding, decoding, feedback, and noise. To get messages through the process, it is important for the marketer to have an extensive understanding of the intended target audience.
To reach the target audience and build value for an organization, the marketer typically sends a consistent message through multiple promotional methods; this is called integrated marketing communications (IMC).