Integrated marketing communication strategy in Coca-Cola's content and storytelling approach

Integrated Marketing Communication is the activity that entails design of effective messages to reach a target audience. The audience in such endeavor is the targeted individual that may also be a part of a class or group. The focus of the activity is to alter, form, or construct attitudes. It follows that the communication should make a lasting impact that evokes a long-term or short-term response to the message delivered.

There are chiefly two ways of transmitting such messages. The first one is through personal meetings and interaction. This is the direct and what is known as 'human-touch' method, where assurance is guaranteed through gestures like a warm handshake, a pat on the back and confident, reassuring facial expressions and a positive body language. Such communications involves the services of sales representatives, customer service personnel or even repair department personnel who can pass on the relevant message adequately. In the IMC program design, they play an important role and should be an invariable part of marketing communication exercise (Advertising Design, n.d.).

The second method is a faster one reaching many individuals simultaneously. Broadcast media like radio and TV are the conventional channels through which messages can be conveyed. These media channels do not possess the same human touch that the sales representatives or customer service personnel carry. The design team in the marketing communication department faces the challenge of creating a message that creates emotions and responses similar to the personal interaction (Advertising Design, n.d.).

Content goals with Audience in mind

Coca-Cola has recognized that one creative way of passing on the content and essence of product highlights is through dynamic and engaging storytelling. It thus looks for stories and creative scenarios that make a lasting and distinct impact about the product. The perception that the recipient gets is that the product adds value to his life (Tilton).

The marketing communications planning team of Coca Cola will create the content under an umbrella theme of "live positively" which is the overriding concern of most people in contemporary times. They plan to create interrelated segments of a whole message and disseminate the messages through various channels. Thus, though each segment creates the message the company seeks, the overbearing theme is common. This resembles the tent shape that has the tent-pole as its main stand and is supported to hold tight through the numerous and displaced pegs. Such strategy will possibly pass on the company image, brand and message effectively and at the same time strike a personal chord (Tilton). In so doing, Coca Cola will reach out to customers as a brand conscious of quality, value, innovativeness, and fluidity. The very characteristics that it stands for will thus be transmitted to the public (Tilton).

Supporting all of this has been the company's own classification of content distinction: ideas formation via stories of the brand; stories so captivating that they can't be controlled (i.e., they're liquid) and inherently relevant to business goals, brand, as well as, consumer interests).

Media Strategy

Coca Cola uses its resources and information carefully, thoroughly analyzing the potential of the market it embarks upon, and the brand it wishes to project as a company. It now wishes to capitalize on its vast information pool to touch prospective clients conscientiously and reposition itself as leader by engaging in stirring ideas. Coca Cola will then convert these ideas into briefs for content creation (Tilton).

This is a major operation. The scale and content needs inputs from different fields of art and science. The company will engage with creative and innovative minds across many agencies over and above its vastly talented internal pool. Thus, it will engage with "industry collaborators." The common guiding principles for all those involved in this IMC will be:

1. Engage the best talent

2. Create a bridge for the participants to interact

3. Follow the principle of equality of participation

4. Keep innovating

5. Get the feedback of the work done (Tilton)

This is a comprehensive strategy as all the guiding principles followed lead to a unique creation. This strategy has taken into account the affectations of the customer making the process cyclic and complete.

Unit 8

Specify the changes in advertising regarding your chosen tradition as portrayed over the years (1920s until today) in advertising in terms of communicating with the customer.

For over ten years, a spurt has been seen in the field of consumer behavior, for studying advertising as a text, a social product, and rhetoric. One can also notice growing acknowledgement of the fact that advertising requires more focus than it is getting now. Bearing the above two aspects (shifts in perception) in mind, an attempt is made to further develop commercial visual expression theory using a carefully selected example. A close analysis is offered of one specific visual trope or rhetorical device, which is a standard in advertising, namely, white space. This white space or 'negative space' refers to the evidently open space that can be obtained between other objects or design elements within an ad's borders. It is normally used to communicate style, command, leadership, dependability, honesty, sophisticated taste, and modern nature, linked with the elite of society (Pracejus, Olsen, & Guinn, 2006).

In 1843, Sir Henry Cole was the very first individual to send a commercially-made Christmas card. Subsequently, images of Santa Claus and Christmas continued to evolve through the late 1800s and early 1900s. During that period, Christmas cards garnered immense popularity, and helped form the prevalent visual Christmas imagery holds its charm even today. Ads used parallel images, though in those days, advertising