A section in Philip Kotler’s “Marketing Management” provides a compact, yet valuable step by step approach on designing an
effective process of communicating with one’s customers. Communication includes advertisements, sales promotion, special offers etc.
The first step is to find out at what level of involvement the
customer is with the product, and accordingly design the communication message.
If the
potential customer is unaware of a brand or product, the company’s promotion efforts should be directed at building this awareness, usually of the name of the product/company. There are customers who are aware of the brand, as a name, but do not have adequate knowledge of the characteristics and benefits of the product. In this case the message content should be informative in nature. Next, there could be customers who are aware of the brand and what the product offers, but for some reason/s they look at the product unfavourably. In this case the company has to take measures to identify why this is so, rectify problems if they do indeed exist, and then design communications to bring out this fact, and create a liking for the product.
If the potential customer likes the product, but not enough in preference to others, efforts should be directed at highlighting certain benefits of the product, usually ones that the competition does not possess, and entwine this into the message. The aim should be to make the target audience convinced enough to buy the product.
Finally, some potential customers may like and be convinced about the product’s performance, but they still may not get down to actually purchasing it. In this instance the efforts and communication should be directed at guiding the customer to take the final step. This could be in the form of a reduced price, or special offers etc.