Marketing Communications An Integrated Approach

Communication with the market is an important activity for many businesses and organizations. It is also relevant to us as consumers because we are exposed to hundreds of messages from marketers every day. The course is aimed at enabling students to learn in depth the development, implementation and evaluation of marketing communication (marcom) activities. The course provides students with relevant knowledge about how businesses interact or communicate with the market. In particular, because planning and executing marketing communication programs are typically the responsibilities of marketing executives, the course can help students to prepare for a job position that involves marketing communications. It can help them deepen their understanding of marketing - in particular, what marketing communications involve and how marketing communications enable an organisation to achieve its objectives. The course is designed to foster your logical thinking and creativity regarding marketing communications. Although this course is oriented towards practice, we still cover theories and concepts essential to your understanding of marketing communication (marcom) practices (e.g., how they work and their applicability). Learning these theories and concepts is also important because they facilitate you to choose and justify your choice and design of marcom activities. Instead of treating marcom as a set of stand-alone tools or activities, the course regards it as a blended mix of coordinated activities. The course put roughly equal emphasis on both traditional marcom tools (e.g., advertising and sales promotion) and non-traditional tools (e.g., search engine marketing and social media marketing). The course compares the similarities and differences of these tools, and discusses how they can be integrated for achieving the marketer's objectives. While non-traditional marcom tools catch marketers' attention nowadays, traditional marcom tools are indispensable for particular purposes and under certain circumstances.