Convergent Approach Characteristics
The role of the customer in the convergent environment is improving the business activities as they can convey the leaders about what is good and bad for the business operating procedures. The customers improve the products by sending the quality improvement surveys to the business clients and sifting through the survey outcomes (Duralia, 2018). The other role is providing feedback through social media channels and online reviews so that the business can identify areas where they can generate profits and increase in market share.
- When marketing moves from traditional sense to convergence environment, then it causes breaking down of the siloed sectors, dependent on the technology, security issues and high competition in the online market.
- The role of traditional silo sector of marketing is decentralizing efforts by assigning of the channels to people and agencies in usage. The role of traditional silo sector of advertising is delivering communication towards target market. The role of traditional silo sector of public relations is building brand and minimizing the negative publicity (Juska, 2021).
- Characteristics of traditional approach to marketing are:
- Traditional markets are being owned and managed by the government.
- The business is diverse as well as united in same location.
- The goods and services are to be offered on locally made.
Characteristics of convergent approach to marketing are:
- It is using unidirectional message to promote the brand.
- It wants engagement of the customers to interact with the brand and show the content of the business brand (Ngamsutti, Jhundra-indra, & Raksong, 2018).
- It is focused on online channels to increase in business revenue, and improve the relationships with the target customers.
The convergent approaches are included authentic content and it is a base of decision making process within the community while the traditional approaches contain polished contents as well as based on the economic decision making.
- Email marketing: The interactive metric is website.
Social media: The interactive metric is mobile application.
Public relations and print media: The interactive metric is website.
Print ad: It directs people to the website and the social media page and printed in the newspapers and magazines.
On-site search: It allows the users to regain the results from the website by typing of the queries in the search bar.
Commerce platforms: It provides the business owners with designing the website based on the requirements of the business.
- The convergence approach impacts the clients by helping them to interact with the business owners through online medium. Even it provides positive impact on the business as they can provide the services and goods to the client in faster way (Kushwaha et al., 2020).
- Legislation which can affect the marketing in convergent environment is data protection and privacy legislation that specifies how the data is to be collected and shared with the third parties. Privacy act 1974, where the records of the individuals are protected like the name, identifying number, and others.
- Regulation which can affect the marketing in convergent environment is fair packaging and labeling act 1966 helps to prevent usage of the unfair methods to pack and label the commodities distributed to the consumer.
- The policies and procedures for the Ethical Trading Group which are required to modify and change are privacy policy, whistle blower policy and finance authorization policy (Oluwafemi & Adebiyi, 2018). The other policies are disciplinary action policies, safety policies, and employee performance policies.
- An appropriate technological expert is identified by the process the expert is using to develop features of the online technologies, creating user interface and monitoring the performance analytics. The expert is identified based on their performance in past 10 years with corporate experience, peer ratings received, quality of tacit knowledge, certification achieved for professional standards and career performance performing the number of years.
- The expert is engaged by appointing them through the telephone discussion. There is exchange of contacts with the expert.At first, the business sends an email to the expert regarding their engagement with their company and asked to share contact via email. After the contact is being shared, the expert is called for the interview to engage with the business. It is a method used to discuss the situations, issues and what the expert is required to overcome with the issues (Twum & Yalley, 2021).
- At the time of engaging with the marketing communication convergence, the expert is required to be marketing communicator, who is accountable to distribute the promotional materials, respond to the queries of the customers and share the comments on the social media.
The three ways that can establish as well as maintain the business networks along with external expert to stay updated on the marketing communication convergence are using of the content management system, using the marketing automation tools and social network monitoring software (Gordon-Isasi, Narvaiza, & Gibaja, 2021).
- It is ensured that messages are unified across the synchronized offering by transferring the messages to other methods of communication. Such a social media platform is used to spread messages. It is the best way to send message to the friend through this network and the business can share same messages to the intended audience (Sulaeman & Kusnandar, 2020).
- The customers are ensured that the message is unified, by reaching to the customers by offering them to provide feedback regarding what is right or wrong (Porcu et al., 2019).It helps to reduce the productivity of the resource and also lessen the time period and price.
- The selected marketing technique is promotion. It is the technique used to entice the customers to purchase of the product. It is mainly used to increase in the market share as well as promote new product in the target market. Example, the social media promotion, contests, branded promotional gifts are the promotion marketing techniques (Sugandini et al.,2018).
- The key technologies as well as distributed services that can impact on the convergent solutions are Smartphones, social media,customer relationship management, voice search and Trello.
The selected marketing tool is social media marketing. The link is: https://neilpatel.com/what-is-social-media-marketing/
- The Ethical Trading Group is using the social media marketing tool such as Facebook,to connect with the audience to build the brand of the sustainable services to the customers, increase in the business sales and drive the website traffic. It also provides strong market potential, expansion of the global markets and provides new product lines.
- From the perspective of the integrated marketing strategy, Facebook is used for meeting with the marketing goals, ranging from the customer services, gaining the customer insights and word of mouth marketing to direct marketing (Ngamsutti, Jhundra-indra, & Raksong, 2018).
- Facebook is customer centric as it provides great customer services and also handles the complaints of the customers plus their concerns on the social media.
- Facebook is cost effective as it is used by the business to meet with the requirements of the target customers, boost the business sales over selected time instances. This tool is using 11.7% of the total budget of the marketing on the social media (Sugandini et al., 2018). The software tool integration of social marketing tool is less. It takes some minutes to maintain the content of the marketing.
- The three traditional tools are personal selling, sponsorship and television marketing. The personal selling is effective tool for integrated marketing as it takes place when the marketers are selling the products to the client. The sponsorship is associated with event by the customers and attendees where the sponsor events are conducted to reach the business goals (Anabila, 2020). It is improving the public image and building prestige.Television marketing is driving the promotion and the viewers are watching television to get details of the products and services.
References
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Juska, J. M. (2021). Integrated marketing communication: advertising and promotion in a digital world. Routledge.
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Sulaeman, M., & Kusnandar, H. F. (2020). Integrated Marketing Communication Model in Shaping Brand Equity and Business Performance in the Creative Industries of Embroidery Sector. Budapest International Research and Critics Institute (BIRCI-Journal): Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(4), 3798-3805.
Twum, K. K., & Yalley, A. A. (2021). Green Integrated Marketing Communication. In Green Marketing in Emerging Markets (pp. 117-144). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.