ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the goals for marketing communications, and explores how best to achieve the desired result. Getting the customer's attention is increasingly difficult due to media fragmentation, simultaneous media use, and myriad other challenges. While advertising remains an important tool for communicating the value proposition and nurturing the customer-brand relationship, the challenges make it unlikely that any long-term relationship can be sustained through traditional media advertising alone. The various publics or stakeholders on which public relations practitioners generally focus include groups similar to the customer groups. The first goal is an offensive measure to go after additional business; the second and third are more defensive in nature. Most brands build their sales promotion activities targeted to intermediaries around some sort of price reduction technique, knowing that the intermediary is likely to accept the offer where the greatest profit can be realized. Sales promotion offers, particularly value-added offers, calls attention to the brand's differentiating benefits.
