imc plan for interflora
TRANSCRIPT
Department of MarketingAssignment
Session: 2015/2016
Semester: Semester 2
Degree: MSc International Marketing
Class Code/Title: MK994 – Integrated Marketing
Communication
Class Coordinator: Dr Nusa Fain
Assignment (Individual or Group): Individual
Submission Deadline: Thursday, 5 May 2016 at 12.00pm
Student Name: Charachada Dechkriengkraikun
Introduction
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Interflora is recognized as the largest flower delivery network in UK and Ireland for
over 90 years. Since 1923, the concept of interflora were brought from America to UK at the
first time and later internationalize to other 140 countries which accounting for 40,000 florist
shops around the world. In addition to physical shops, Interflora’s website represent great
range of product varieties which allow customers make an online purchase.
Interflora brand’s stand for trusted, personal touch and WOW! Experience. The brand
emphasize on fast delivery and excellent personal touch service. Each bouquet was designed
perfectly by expert florists and hand-delivered to customers with great care. Moreover, the
brand promise to give best quality of flowers by offer 7 days guarantee of freshness.
Therefore, customers could ask for refund when there are dissatisfaction from recipients or
late delivery. All of these messages are obviously associated with Interflora brand identity
including iconic Mercury Figure, ‘Interflora’ word mark, and ‘the flower experts’ strapline.
All consistent elements make the brand stand out in market place.
Although Interflora is the brand leader, it does not stop searching new opportunities to
sales more flowers. Recently, the brand try to boost young consumers’ awareness of
grandparents’ day because they believe that this day is a perfect flower gifting occasion.
Unfortunately, UK Youngers have low awareness about Grandparents’ day. Therefore, this
essay aims to create effective integrated marketing communications (IMC) campaign plan for
Interflora related to Grandparents’ day. The essay represents four parts including analysis of
the creative brief, recommendation for IMC campaign, campaign’s communication
evaluation method, and conclusion respectively.
Part I: Analysis of the creative brief
2.1 Company Background
Interflora provide clear information in terms of their type of business, brand
positioning, organization value, unique selling points (USPs), promises, and top three target
segments (Alpha Territory, Professional rewards, and Careers and kids). Recently, Interflora
start to think of campaign to increase young adults’ awareness of Grandparents’ Day in UK.
However, it would be even better to provide some additional information about
previous campaign and the result in the brief. These are the following previous successful
campaign that could be add to project brief.
2.1.1 Interflora’s Twitter Campaign: Saying it with Flowers!
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This is a social media campaign designed to strengthen the brand’s relationship with
online communities (Shearman, 2010). In September 2010, Interflora monitored daily tweets,
@InterfloraUK, looking for users who appeared glum (George, 2010). Once found, the users
were contacted directly and sent a surprise bouquet of flowers to cheer them up.
2.1.2 Interflora ‘the Power of Flowers’
This is another digital campaign which blooms just in time for Mother’s Day. In 2015,
the campaign used powerful emotional 30-second ad to reflect on the many reasons to send
flowers to mom on Mother’s Day (Mccarthy, 2015). Overall, it designed to communicate that
Interflora’s flowers is the perfect gift for mom.
2.1.3 Surprise Someone Special (SurpriseFlowers campaign)
In 2014, Interflora decided to partner with ITV’s Surprise Surprise to launch
SurpriseFlowers campaign (Jamiet, 2014). The campaign asking the Great British public to
recommend their friend or family member who deserves to receive stunning Interflora
flowers, hand-delivered by Mark Wright, the TV star (Jamiet, 2014).
2.2 Problems and opportunities (Situation analysis)
Interflora is the market leader of flower delivery in UK market for long time.
However, the competition in flower delivery market become more intense over time as many
high street brand began to enter the market. Therefore, it is necessary to established good
relationship with customers and reach new consumers to protect the market share. For most
of flower delivering company, Christmas, Valentine’s, and Mother’s Day are the peak period
of flower gifting. Besides those periods, Interflora aware of opportunity of Grandparents’
Day as another opportunities for flower gifting occasion. However, UK people still have low
awareness of Grandparents’ Day. Therefore, the brand attempt to boost awareness of
Grandparents’ Day to young consumers as they feel that it is a perfect occasion to boost sales
and reach new consumers (young adults). At the same time, the brand should also beware of
their own demand and capacity management to avoid negatives world of mouth as in
Mother’s Day resulting from failure of maintaining standards and quality control (Dailymail,
2016). The summary of situation analysis summarizes in table below (Table 1).
Table 1: Inteflora’s SWOT
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2.3 Objective of campaign and expected response
According to the brief, the main objective is to increase younger consumers’
awareness of Grandparents’ day together with promote Interflora brand and product range.
As it mentioned in brand value, Interflora expected to see wow reaction from customers. This
objective reflect the main idea of what they want to achieve, however, it is not specific
enough thus make it difficult to evaluate the campaign’s result. According to (Pickton and
Broderick, 2005, p. 421), the good objective should be SMARRTT (specific, measurable,
achievable, realistic, relevant, targeted, and timed). Therefore, the objective in brief should be
demonstrate clear and precise goals which easy for evaluating the campaign result. The new
objectives could be set as following.
Objectives
To increase young adults awareness of grandparents’ day compare with last year day
compare with last year.
To increase Interflora’s sales by 20 percent compare with Grandparents’ Day in last
year (2015).
70 percent of young adult and grandparents who receive wow experience from
Interflora during grandparents’ day, spread the positive word of mouth through offline
and online channel.
To obtain at least 2000 new visitors from digital media such as official website,
Facebook, and Twitter after Grandparents’ day.
2.4 Target audience
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In general, Interflora emphasized on top 3 segments which has substantial income
such as Alpha territory, professional rewards, and careers and kids. However, the target
groups of Grandparents’ day campaign is UK young adults who visit their grandparents less
often due to living in distance place or having a busy lifestyle. In my point of views, the
target audience is well defined. Although, UK consists of four countries, it is not necessary to
divided UK in to four sub segments and adopt different marketing campaign. Due to sharing
many similarity customs, adopting similar IMC strategies across 4 countries could be more
cost effective and create consistent message. The segmentation, target audience, and
positioning (STP) of Interflora summarizes in the table below (Table1).
Table 1: STP of Interflora
Part II: Recommendation for IMC campaign
Integrated Marketing communication (IMC) is defined as one elements of marketing
mix, namely, promotion (Kotler, 2006; McCarthy, 1996). It is the process of integrating all
marketing communication activities (promotional mix) across relevant audience point to
achieve greater brand coherence (Pickton, and Broderick, 2005, p. 26). Generally, traditional
marketing communications includes five elements, namely, advertising, personal selling,
sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing (McCarthy, 1996). Besides traditional
marketing activities, using cyber marketing (Online media) should be integrated with other
marketing communication tools since it is cost efficient, real time, and interactive (Pickton,
and Broderick, 2005; Peltier, Schibrowsky, and Schultz, 2003). Moreover, 74 percent of
Great Britain young adults consume new brand content via digital channels (National
Readership Survey, 2015).
Many companies combines communication channels to promote brand concept, give
consistent product information, managing customer relationships (Duncan, 2002; Shimp,
2002; Kotler et al, 1999). Using multiple media class and media vehicle could make company
reach wider target audience resulting in high media impact (Pickton, and Broderick, 2005, p,
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471). Moreover, customer perceived the messages delivered from different communication
tools as the single message thus IMC should be used to create consistency and reduce
consumer confusion (Schultz, Tannenbaum, and Lauterborn, 1993). Finally, all
communication channels has its own advantages and disadvantages (Sunday and Bayode,
2011). Therefore, it is important to select and combine appropriate one to gain synergies
effects thus enhance profit and compensate for disadvantages of each channels and (Nielsen,
2009).
Advantages and disadvantages of each promotional tools (Sunday and Bayode, 2011)
This section suggest IMC campaign which aims to boost awareness of Grandparents’
Day and promote Interflora brand to younger consumer in UK, namely, Dear grandparents
with love.
Campaign “Dear grandparents with love”
These is the Integrated marketing communication campaign which aims to create
young adults awareness of Grandparents’ Day together with interflora brand. First, using
advertising to create emotional response towards grandparents. Then, creating event “flower
design competition” which grandparents and young adults could have fun together on
Grandparent’s Day thus enhance the family relationship. In this event, participants must team
up with one of their grandparents and create wonderful Interflora boutique within one hour.
Third, using sell promotion to stimulate purchasing intention by design special grandparent’s
boutique and sell at 20 percent discount price. Finally, using public relation to create
company goodwill by upload the event’s VDO clip on e-media, donating a portion of profit
from event to disable elders, and give publicity to media about Interflora campaign and
mention that it is a perfect time the to say thank you to your grandparents.
1.1 Advertising
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Objective: 1) To create awareness of Grandparents’ day and Interflora.
2) To persuade people to attend the upcoming events
Time frame: 1 September to 1 October, 2016
According to AIDA, DAGMAR, and ATR model, creating awareness is the most
important stage since it will bring following sequence of customer behaviors such as interest,
desire, comprehension, conviction, trial, reinforcement, and finally action (Pickton and
Broderick, 2005, p, 86). Manickam (2014) found that advertising trough outdoor, TV, print,
and internet could create high impact to customer awareness.
Actions: First, company could use television, posters, mobile billboard, and e-media as media
class to launch Interflora advertising which create awareness of Grandparent’s Day. Ads
create emotional response that making people miss their grandparents. Moreover, it could use
the same media classes to announce information and persuade young adults to attend
upcoming event “Flora Design Competition”. Table 2 and 3 would related media type to
media objectives and expected cost, respectively.
Table 2: Media and objectives
Table 3: estimated cost of advertising
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1) Use different media class (Reach)2) use each media class more than 1 time
(frequency)3) R X F get higher impact
All of these traditional and digital media should combine and link together to provide
best possible attention. All of these media would provide consistent information about
campaign’s condition such as place, time, and prize and also the link to register page. After
registration, participants would get multimedia invitation cards which is a requirement to
attend the event. According to Pickton, and Broderick (2005), multimedia combines different
format such as text, picture, video, and music into single medium which is considered as
more exciting forms than simple invitation card.
Example of transported- billboard (Bicycle): This type of billboard could generate more
attention to people. Moreover, some people might record the VDO clip and post in on social
media.
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Media buying
If Interflora is interest in more than 1 media vehicles in each media class, CPT
could be used to calculate cost efficiency and select the cheapest one .
Multimedia invitation includes
- emotional video : child grow up and have happy time with their grandparents
- soft music
- invitation detail
- slow flower falling animation
Terms and conditions for participating
1) Participants should have age 18 and over, team up with grandparents
2) Competition is not open to professional working florists
3) Participants should visit flora design competition webpage and register before 30
October 2016 to attend the event
4) The winner would get free family trip to Newyork and 100 pound Interflora voucher.
5) Five percent of profit from food, drink, gift shop, and flower shop at the events would
be donated to disable elders.
6) All participants could take designed flowers back home for free and give to their
grandparents as special gift occasion
7) This competition is run by Interflora British Unit.
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1.2 Events marketing
Objective: To create engagement, experience and positive attitude towards Interflora (Flora
Design Competition)
Time frame: 2 October 2016
Place: Hampton court palace garden, London
Events marketing have positive impact on brand equity through shaping the attitude
and experience towards brand (Zarantonello, and Schmitt, 2013). In this events, every
participants would get free Interflora pen and event’ agenda (Figure 1) at the entrance of
event space. The pen is selected as survivor because most of people have to use pen in their
daily life thus it would increase customer ability to recall brand. The pen would design in
black color with gold Interflora logo. Moreover, it should has particular boots such sales
food, drink, gift shop (sell pen, notebook, flower, keychain, shirt, cap with Interflora logo),
and flower shop around the event space (Figure 2). All boots would have sets of Interflora’s
brochure which contain information about their history and unique selling point. In addition,
all staffs in the events should wear black Interflora T-shirt, cap and jeans to represent young
and active looks as well as promote Interflora brand.
Figure 1: Event Agenda
Front Back
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*note at the end of Agenda: Candle making tutorial is the activities that add value to flowers
(reuse old flowers in more beneficial way) .It could be a new leisure activities for elders. As a
result, young adults might perceived that flower are the perfect gift for Grandparents’ Day.
Figure 2. Design and layout of event space
1.3 Sale promotion “gift for grandparents”
Objective: To increase sales on grandparents’ day
Time frame: 29 September – 3 October, 2016
Sales promotion has positive effect on purchasing intention (Santini, et al., 2015).
Monetary promotion is more suitable for products that carry utilitarian value while non-
monetary promotions are more appropriate for products with hedonic value (Santini, et al.,
2015). Interflora product contain hedonic value, however, it could combine both monetary
(discount) and non-monetary (limited edition) to encourage greatest sales effects. Interflora
could design a special grandparent boutiques during 29 September to 3 October and sell at 20
percent discount price to stimulate young adult’s willingness to buy flowers for their
grandparents.
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1.4 Public relation (CSR)
Objective: To increase to create positive attitude and goodwill of the brand.
Timeframe: after Grandparents’ Day
Public relation is the significant tools to raise brand credibility (Mikáčová and
Gavlaková, 2014). In this campaign, Interflora could upload pictures and VDO clip of events
in e-media such as Facebook, twitter, and website which represent the happiness of
grandparents and young adults when doing activities together. Moreover, donate 5 percent of
profit to disable elder as another corporate social responsibility (CSR). In addition, company
could give publicity about important of grandparent’s day as another day for big family
reunited and create happiness for elder.
Part III: Campaign’s communication evaluation
After finished conducting IMC plan, it is necessary to set plans for evaluation before,
during, and after the campaign. According to Pickton and Broderick (2005), there are five
benefits in evaluating the campaign including improved decision making, risk reduction,
improved campaign, cost saving, and accumulated wisdom. Interflora should select and
combine the right media class which reflect highest effectiveness. As higher a brand’s
effectiveness of IMC could lead to higher market shares (Lee and Park, 2007).
3.1) Pre-testing: evaluation of marketing communication before start the campaign in order
to reduce risk of failure and resource wasting (Pickton and Broderick, 2005).
Focus group interview could be used before launch the actual marketing campaign.
First, recruit tens experts in the IMC field to seek their comments, critiques, and suggestions
about two IMC campaigns which mentioned above. At these stage, the brand could get
suggestion from the experts about which IMC media class are more or less effective based on
their experience. Second, testing the effect of pre-launching adverts with tens young adults by
conducting hall test.
Focus group (with experts)
- Recruit 10 experts in the IMC field which specialized in advertising, event marketing,
and digital marketing.
- Ask them the general ideas about class that Interflora plan to use.
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- Ask them which channel of media vehicles (for television) that they have used gain
the most effective result.
- How many time and what period which their ads on air and get highest response. This
is for setting the schedule of TV ads.
- Discuss the content of message in TV ads, posters, and internet before conducting hall
test with young adults.
Hall test (with young adults) :
- Recruits 20 young adults from shopping street to viewing room
- Let them see the ads then record their facial expression when they see the video ads
(Flora design competition) in order to measure emotional impacts.
- Do they missing their grandparents after they see the ads?
- Does ads has impact on their intention to attend the events?
- Let them see the content of posters and discuss whether the content message and
design could capture their attention.
- Let them see the agenda and ask them “If you are the participants, do you think the
time frame and activities are appropriate” (Flora design competition).
- Ask them whether the prize impact their willingness to participate the events.
Overall, pre-testing marketing communication allow Interflora to improve their
message content and incentives to participating events before launch the actual campaign.
Therefore, it would increase the confidence that IMC campaigns have high potential to
become successful.
3.2) Post-testing: This stage would determine whether campaign able achieve objective, at
least cost, without distorting the original message (Pickton and Broderick, 2005).
1) Achieve all of these objectives
• Increase young adults awareness of grandparents’ day compare with last year. This
could be evaluated by monitoring social media on grandparent’s day and how people post
the picture of themselves and grandparents compare with last year.
• Interflora’s sales on Grandparents’ Day should increase by 20 percent from last year
as state in the objective.
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• 70 percent of young adult and grandparents who receive wow experience from
Interflora during grandparents’ day, spread the positive word of mouth through offline
and online channel. These could be measure by distributing short questionnaire at the end
of events which ask participants whether they like this events and will they tell others
about this events.
• To obtain at least 2000 new visitors from digital media such as official website,
Facebook, and Twitter after Grandparents’ day.
2) Cost-effectiveness
Besides evaluating campaign trough objectives, Interflora should also consider the
cost and return on Investment (ROI). The profit which they get after campaign should be at
least 20 percent more than their investment on advertising and events.
Part V: Conclusion
In the recent year, there is increase in competition among flower delivery industry
especially on Christmas, Valentine’s, and Mother’s Day. However, not many UK people give
any gift to their grandparents on the Grandparents’ Day although it was introduced to the UK
since 1990. Interflora see Grandparents’ Day as another opportunities for flower gifting
occasion but first they need to increase awareness of Grandparents’ Day to young adults.
Therefore, this papers suggest creative strategy for Interflora as purpose to increase
awareness of Grandparents’ Day to young adults. First, promoting the ads of grandparents’
Day by using TV advertising, Transported- billboard, poster, and e-media. Second, creating
flora design competition events to enhance family relationship between young adults and
their grandparents. Third, using sales promotion to stimulate sales. Finally, creating company
goodwill and positive attitude by uploading the event’s VDO clip in e-media such as
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Website together with donate 5 percent of event’s profit to
disable elders. Overall, this Grandparents’ Day campaign integrate three communication mix
including advertising, events, sale promotions and public relation (CSR). At the end, the
result of campaign should be achieving objective with in the budget and get at least 20
percent return on investment.
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