The advertisements targeting parents in magazines might emphasize the nutritional components of the cereal and its effectiveness in enhancing their children's overall health and development, while not being a cereal they would have to 'force-feed' to their children during an unpleasant mealtime struggle in the morning.
IMC strives to deploy new media and old media in an integrated and effective manner, but with a coherent message. This coherency increases simplicity and ultimately makes the promotion more effective. Similar slogans and catchphrases in the child and adult-targeted advertising would be necessary to avoid confusion -- one would not want the adult to accidentally buy the wrong cereal for the child, for example, due to a confusion of what cereal he or she saw in the advertisement or what the child was begging for by name. Also, the parent must 'walk away' with the promoted health benefits of the whole grain, fortified cereal enough so that he or she feels compelled to become a consumer.
Later...
When interviewing different consumers about their reasons for purchasing (or not purchasing) the product, the focus groups should be asked about product desirability overall. But to truly test the effectiveness of an IMC strategy, they must also be asked what message they 'took away' from the advertising and marketing strategies. Did they take away an integrated and singular message from all media used, or was the message confused? This is the critical question to evaluate the 'integrated' aspect of an IMC campaign. Individuals from the target audiences should also be solicited to determine what media they most often consulted when making personal product decisions and what aspects of the campaign they found uniquely compelling. The media balance may need to be reevaluated to better reach the target consumers of the product, in this case, parents and children.
