 سلام علیکم خواتین حضرات، بسیم ایساً ویلکم سیو، لیکٹر No. 36 of Brand Management MKT624 at the Virtual University of Pakistan. پاکستان دیتوپک ہے still، کمینکیشن، میننگ کمینکیٹنگ your brand's positioning in the most effective way with the help of so many different tools and the tools that we already have covered so far are advertising and promotions we still have a few more tools at our disposal to communicate our brand's positioning and the one I'm going to start talking about is the public relationing or in other words PR PR is something which also can help you to leverage with your brand with the help of magazines, newspapers and also television it is because of this public relationing exercise that you talk about your brand in relation to a success story or in relation to the certain innovative features which you have created and you think you should be talking about the competitive advantage which those features bring to your brand so in other words you really can sustain that competitive advantage by having coverage in magazines and newspapers and also through television shows which you can sponsor sustaining the competitive advantage is one of the prime things the prime objectives which you can achieve with the help of the advertorials that's what they call in the magazines and the television shows which you sponsor so this the tool of communication has its own importance and has its own mechanism a heart works is basically through the relationship that you have with different agencies as and when could you step up your advertising or as and when could you get into advertising and other promotional campaigns with the help of different agencies like I said you develop relationships with them and these agencies and also the people from the media they see to it that the people like you and meaning their clients they gain importance and they come into limelight and their brands are really promoted in the most effective way if the brands really carry a very tangible promise that's a given which you must be aware of if the brand does not really carry a very effective and tangible kind of a promise then you may not get total support from the media in terms of public relation exercise you also can talk about the social responsibilities that your company has because what entirely assumed through itself for example if the company has decided to go into a forestation the meaning plantation of trees along the road sites you should talk about that maybe one of the executives one of the high ups from the company can give an interview to the media and bring the whole thing into a limelight if you are helping special children by promoting their cause of the well being then you should talk about that also the objective here is to put together a very effective strategy with the well pursued goals that can bring your brand into limelight and that can get your brand with positive publicity in an effective way and not in a cheap way that is something that we have to keep in our minds that's very important so the well pursued goals and effective strategy in order to see to it that the whole thing becomes attention getting is an important objective of a PR exercise PR is not always exercised and bringing about publicity for positive things but you can also get into a PR exercise because the situation is negative and to give you the one example I will refer you to the 2006 bird flu crisis you will recall that there are companies within our country that really educated their customers in relation to the crisis which really inflicted the industry and they educated the consumers about the precautions they should take and they communicated with their consumers in other ways in a very comprehensive way so as they could really educate themselves about which decisions to take and which not to take in terms of buying so that is an important exercise you can undertake when the situation is negative suppose something goes wrong with your product and you find that out from the market the meaning there is a serious kind of quality with a defect in the product and you have to deal with the situation at that juncture it is a huge challenge and a tall order well in the first place you start recalling that product which is sitting in the market just to make sure that the defective product does not get into any further hands and you also like to recall that product or those items which already have gotten into the hands of the final consumer so coming up with the mechanism which is going to take care of that kind of an exercise does carry with itself a very important element of PR because while you undertake that kind of an exercise you also have to continuously communicate with your customers and consumers why it has taken place and what are the measures that you have undertaken to correct that because you never would like your customers to have the impression that you have breached a contract as a matter of fact the challenge in that kind of a situation is to convert a negative situation into a positive one by testifying before your audience that you are a very responsible company that is talking facts with its customers and that is very concerned about their customers who have somehow bought a defective product and in the process you convince them that that kind of defective will not take place again like I said it is a tall order but the fundamental principle in managing this kind of crisis is that you get into some level of contingency the planning which basically relates if and then relationships if this happens then we shall do that if this happens we shall do that so it is basically the if and then relationships that you have to develop but then easier said than done there are situations which crop up without stirring your imagination before they cropped up so what did you do in that kind of a situation so it is at that point that you have a challenge to deal with that kind of a situation the managing that is a PR exercise and you are going to have to be very straight and honest with your customers that is another fundamental while undertaking this exercise if you start playing games with the objective of outsmarting with your customer thinking that you can outsmart them you forget about that the most fundamental thing is to stay very straight and take them into confidence take them into confidence in a way that they do not end up losing confidence in your product instead they should have the thinking well this kind of a situation can inflict any company and they are going to be happy at least that they have acknowledged the lapse that took place somewhere along the manufacturing process and they are really concerned about the defective product they are going to rectify it and they are going to be much richer in their experience because the reputation of the company tells that the company will never let its customers down so this is an important tool of communication to which you can make use of you only have to be careful about the circumstances and situations in which you really can use this tool another tool I am going to talk about is event marketing event marketing and sponsorships really are meant for creating good wealth for the company and for the brand you have to be very well connected in the market in order to be able to make use of these tools when you are known for undertaking event marketing many organizations will contact you to undertake their events and whether you can get into things like I talked about earlier meaning award ceremonies are the sponsorships of television programs in terms of cooking in terms of usage of the products in different ways and coverage of sports events and these are the things which you are very well exposed to and therefore I do not think I really have to throw a lot of light on that but what you really need to keep in mind is that event marketing is definitely more economical than advertising meaning it is less expensive and it offers you a very good opportunity of reaching your target market here the most important question is the event that you are covering does that really help you reach your target market you may cover an event in the most effective way so to say meaning apparently but if you are not really reaching your target market then coverage of that event is no good for the company and for the brand so in other words the fundamental that we have to keep in our mind is that the target market reach the buy covering a certain event on television or in terms of the function at a certain location is very important in terms of the connectivity with the target that is going to buy our brand another fundamental that we have to keep in our mind is that while executing the event we should not we as brand managers should not really get subdued by the glamour of the event itself so what it really means is that as the event goes by you have to talk about your brand meaning you have to communicate with your target market about your brand in direct or indirect subtle ways that you remind them all the time that the event is being organized and executed by your particular brand that is a very important objective not to be forgotten with that we now get on to another tool of communication which is extremely important all of the tools are important but this one has become much more important under the present days technological advances and this is what you call direct marketing do not get surprised if I am going to talk all over again about direct marketing but here I am going to talk about direct marketing in the context of communications and not in the context of the channels I did talk about that in the context of the channels of distribution but here it is going to revolve around the communication process this mode of the marketing goes basically to the very well structured communications and that takes place mostly in the form of catalogs and this mode of communication is very common and popular in developed countries this still has to make its mark in our market but the time may not be far when this kind of practice will be undertaken by people like you so we have got to talk about this we have got to know the importance and impact of this mode of communication direct marketing in the terms of communication has become popular or took hold in the markets where it is a norm rather than a deviation from the standard practice where people really are short of time because of the shortage of time and the fact that the customers are of the opinion that the products being sold directly by way of very effective communication or quality products customers really opt for this medium and they really are sold to the effort undertaken by a brand managers meaning the communication process unleashed by the brand managers by way of catalogs but technological advances have brought certain innovations to this process not that catalogs have ceased to exist but thanks to the latest technology by way of which we really can communicate with the customer not by sending by the postage mail of those catalogs but rather by electronic mails and through the internet and those are the kind of things to which you are very well aware of and very well exposed to and we now have gotten into an era of direct marketing and the communications to which you may call a new marketing the terminology of new marketing has been coined by one of the marketing experts and this basically refers to the plans that have taken place owing to information technology and the concept has gotten a lot of strength in terms of your ability to reach your customers on one-on-one basis when you do that you really can communicate with your customers in a much more effective way and those are the effective ways which I am going to talk about in relation to this method of communication you really can maintain one-to-one relationship because you are not only aware of the name and the address of the customer but you also are aware of the preferences of that particular customer in relation to different campaigns which you kicked off in the past meaning you know because of this communication process the kind of reaction or the response to which your one particular customer showed to your one particular campaign so it is not only restricted to the name address and demographics it really transcends those limits and gets into so many other things which fall within the area of psychographics and which fall within the response effect area of your customers so to say and you really can then improve your campaigns for the times to come because you know the responses given by your customers to your one particular campaign and that is the beauty of this communication and it doesn't take a long time to get those responses Relationship has to be developed in this kind of communication process because without that relationship you may not be able to generate the kind of responses which you are wanting to generate so the ones that the relationship between your company or your brand and the customer is developed you have to further nurture it and you nurture it in a way that your customers do not get really tired of the communication which takes place every now and then rather you have to carry that out in the most productive way in the most optimal way that customers do end up providing you with the responses which are best suited to improving your brand based customer model that is the basic idea behind this communication the data bank which you maintain has got to be capitalized on and has got to be exploited to the fullest so that you know the individual preferences in relation to different promotional situations that is the fundamental that you have to keep in mind so what I am talking about is that you can maintain the different kinds of records for each customer that show not only the different kinds of relevant classification data as name and demographics but rather their individual preferences and the responses to certain previous campaigns that you carried out so previous purchases and responses to those communications to the which you carried out after those purchases in the word made and gives you further insights into what you should be doing next time so that is the beauty of this process that you really can analyze right down to the individual the level of what you should be doing the fact is that companies can really target individuals and groups of individuals in a much more accurate way not only effective but much more accurate way in line with the objectives which the companies have the companies like I said they can measure the response effects with the help of this kind of communication there are FMCG the companies which are getting into direct marketing only because they can communicate directly with their customers now it is not easy and it is not really possible for every FMCG company it really is possible and less difficult for those FMCG companies that offer a host of different items and a broad portfolio of brands so that they carry some kind of attraction while communicating with their customers and while delivering those products to their customers so what I am saying is that if you are a one brand company you may not be as effective in comparison with a company that carries a broad portfolio of products and broad portfolio of brands such companies are maintaining the data bank consisting of millions and millions and because this kind of marketing and communication is free of geographic borders especially in relation to the developed markets you can really get into contract with customers who are across your national borders and interesting and challenging concept as it is you've got to exercise this in the context of your market the given the opportunities and limitations you have a lot of opportunities and you also have limitations to use an advanced method of the selling to consider all those factors and then make the decision to give you some insights into how you really can go forward with direct marketing with the help of direct communication you can get into JV's meaning joint ventures with like-minded companies and get into a direct effort you can join hands with your distributors as an extended enterprise and do something direct you can join hands with those companies which offers you opportunities for the co-branding and exercising the concept of co-branding at the same time they may not be a bad idea so this is what I said look into your opportunities and do not be mindless of the limitations which the exercise may present and may present in a negative way based on the models which you have developed you can tailor the offer meaning the direct offer in relation to the individual preferences and that is the beauty of this model just think about the direct delivery service offered by so many different fast food restaurants in our country not only they are adding to their sales not only they are offering a better customer value and you will recall what customer value is good price, good performance, good service and all those things so not only they are doing all that they are also generating on daily basis rather on every minute basis a data bank which they are going to use for months to come for years to come they have a complete data bank into which they can mine and they can come up with just about the right most information needed under a particular set of circumstances which really can lead you to have your customers give your response in the light of the preferences which you thought just about the preferences that they have and that will testify that the decisions which you made were just about the right most decisions and you made those decisions only because you had a beautiful data bank so this is what you really can do with the help of direct communication meaning direct marketing with direct communication electronic communication in particular empirical evidence has it that the sales through direct marketing really are registering increases and the sales through the catalogs and through the internet have topped the more than $500 billion globally but it is not a small amount and even the chain stores which have been very traditional in that approach are also getting into sales based on internet the meaning direct communication which takes place between those stores and the customers just imagine the catalog which is there as part of the website the pictures the access to the alternatives that you can make the pricing variations and the variations in terms of different formats different ingredients and all those extensions which we talked about and which we know and then being able to make the final decision sitting in the closeness of your own because they are not a small advantage so these stores are realizing the advantage which I have just talked about have gotten into the sales based on the internet and the level of sales which they have registered with the help of this medium is very different from the ones that they generate through their different stores so in other words again the evidence has it that these sales are added sales these sales are incremental sales these have not really cut into the sales which take place through their stores so there is no cannibalization so to say and if you can think of getting into this exercise in light of the examples and the concepts that I have talked about you are going to be a creative to the brand manager the huge databases or the data banks which these companies have to themselves are not only helping them to reach their customers in a more efficient and a more effective way these the databases are really attracting other organizations which may like to make use of those databases if you are a company that has a huge database relating your customers now do not forget that they are the same people who are somebody else's customers also so the other companies that are at a loss to create that kind of a database tend to approach you with a business proposition in terms of buying that data and it is not a bad proposition not only that you are maintaining that database to be very effective in relation to your own customers you are also using that database as a product line in itself and a product in itself for the way you are selling to the potential customers in a different creative way and that's not a bad deal you can rent that information or you can sell that information and that becomes a business proposition in itself that's the beauty of maintaining such data banks the use of this medium is increasing at a fast pace and it is because of that reason that you see many ads in the main media with addresses of the websites and that really gives you the dimension of a global the player if you can afford to play the game that way Delivery and this kind of a situation is the responsibility of the seller and wherever you are whatever circumstances you are in you've got to decide the mechanism for delivery meaning are you going to deliver just one item or are you going to deliver items which aggregate to a certain level of amount of rupees whether you are going to continue yourself just within the national borders or are you going to conduct yourself across the borders so these are the questions which you have to answer before you move forward with this kind of a model but the fact remains that this offers a lot of new global opportunities and depending upon the nature of the purchase and the value of the purchase you are going to decide the delivery of the mechanism now having talked about the emerging nature of the communications in such a direct and such a fast way the main question that should come into our minds is how many people surfing the net are going to be really interactive but that is a very weighty question are there so many people who surf the net just for the sake of interest they go into different websites collect information analyze that discuss that but do not take any action so in other words you have to relate the action on part of the customers in relation to the response effects if you have undertaken this the medium of direct selling you should be able to generate a decent level of the customer base and if you do not really succeed in generating that then the effort may not be very productive but the evidence that we have so far is if you put your toes into the water before really jumping into it meaning by the whole thing very carefully after studying all the pros and cons you really can make use of this medium in a positive effective way this brings to an end our discussion on direct marketing all I can say is that you've got to make your decisions when you enter the practical field in light of the opportunities and limitations and I'm sure you will make good decisions whether you want to go into direct marketing through catalogs or through the internet or maybe through both the opportunities are there but be mindful of your limitations and with this we now get on to the next tool of communication which deals with internal involvement of all those within the company responsible for the brand the meaning communication which has to be done by the marketing department with others who are part of the overall team unless we let everyone know what the organization is trying to achieve with the help of communication strategies the communication strategies either will not fully come to life or will take on meanings very contrary to the brand promise and this will be because of the fact that the people will not know what you really are up to I would like to take you back to the example of sandwiches about which I talk in my formative lectures think for a while about the brand's picture which was developed by you full of promises a beautiful contract and also means to deliver that but the only lapse which took place was the communication that you were somehow not in a position to communicate the brand's objectives to the operations department and the operations department at their end was working and testing all its energies into creating a beautiful product not mindful of the fact that the product had to be delivered through direct delivery within a certain amount of time so in other words the amount of time they were taking in preparing those sandwiches did not really correspond with your strategy to reach your customers within that given amount of time there was a cross purpose of the functions because operations did not know what you really wanted so this is the classic example of internal communication or classic example of lack of internal communication the kinds of the conflicts it really creates you therefore you have to make sure that the brand's objectives the brand's vision the brand's picture and brand's promises all are shared by all the departments who are involved in preparing the brand and making it possible for the marketing department or for the company to sell that and to sell that in a way the add copy claims there should be no gap between your practice or your practices and the add copy which is claimed by the company so in other words you have to interact with all the touch points that the brand management may have within the company educating all the functional areas about the objectives like I said is of utmost importance you know what happens when you do that people start feeling very confident in the first place about the overall objectives of the company and they become very clear about brand's vision about the brand's picture and on top of that they start owning the whole process of communication they take a sense of ownership into it which should be the ultimate objective of internal communication and once you know somebody has taken ownership of any process within the organization the chances are the delivery of the product is going to be very much in line with the promise it makes so that is what the internal communication is all about you must be able to the muster the support from all those quarters and angles which are involved into making your brand a success into leveraging your brand which creates value for the company and offers value to the customer so in developing your brand based communication plans you've got to think of every stage of communication that the customer may have with your brand your strategies to the must leg specific emphasis on all possible encounters that the brand will have with the customer you will recall that the brand communicates with the customers before buying and during the sale and after the sale this is something of the brand management so you've got to be the mindful of your strategies that must special emphasis on all encounters that the brand is going to have with your customers in all the stages with this the discussion on communications comes to an end and before I give you the conclusion let me give you a recap of what we've discussed so far over the last five lectures I started talking about the communications and the very fact that it is because of the communication that we bring the brand's positioning to life and we deal basically with the four strategic elements that are of the very high significance and those are the corporate vision the brand vision the brand promise and brand positioning so in other words we've got to understand these four strategic elements their implications and their relationships with each other before we really can craft a very good communications strategy and before we come to us in order to make that strategy work and I talked about the different tools of communication like advertising, promotions event marketing PR and internal communication the importance of all these tools and also the fact that the advertising and promotions could happen to be the two most visible and most widely used dynamic tools of communication when it comes to advertising we've got to understand the philosophy behind the copy and the brand strategy because without having to understand the fundamentals of the copymaking there is no way that we can create a good advertising campaign so I talked about what are the fundamentals and how they work especially in relation to the response effects of the customers while you are going through an advertising campaign and it was in relation to those response effects that I talked about the phase of awareness which is the first phase leading to comprehension to retention and to final action and it is in relation to the final action that we bring promotions into the game and the promotions really supplement advertising so understanding the brand based strategy in terms of communication the meanings in terms of advertising and promotions in particular I went through the concepts of the copy and copy strategy and then related all the tools available at your disposal with the copy and copy strategy and came up with the different possibilities of having a mixed bag of either advertising or promotions in other words if we understand the rules that lay the foundation for developing the right copy in light of all the strategic developments the products basic nature its character its values and the promises it makes and why those are deliverable then we are on the right lines and the following the rules rightly we really can bridge the gap between the brand's promise and brand's positioning and you will recall that the brand's promise deals with the present and the brand's positioning deals with the future so in other words this is what the vision is all about you know that you are here and you also know that you want to be there so what is it that you want to do that is what the practice of communications is all about and we know different tools that we have at our disposal let us now proceed toward conclusion of this discussion the branding is all about driving the asset value of the brand this is what we can conclude and it is the communication which brings the branding to life which creates the value for the brand and that is how the asset value of the brand is delivered because communication happens to be the main vehicle which drives that the value for that and we can conclude the brand's vision and the brand's promise and brand's positioning this is what I already have talked about while giving you the recap and this is a very important conclusion with that clarity you really can identify your target market because unless you really know who you are talking with your communication is not going to be effective we can also conclude that the communication is all about creating awareness, comprehension and the final action we can conclude from the discussion that if you can develop the right relationships among the various tools of communication and they come up with the most optimal bag of communications you really can succeed in developing the right level of awareness and comprehension and generate the desired action in other words you really can create the customers you can maintain those customers and by maintaining those customers you can create the loyalty and you can create lot of value for the brand in terms of the company and also in terms of the customer and that is what the whole thing is all about now let me summarize what we have covered so far over the last 35 36 lectures we started with the concept of brand management and then we learned how to develop the brand vision and that was the first phase of the brand management strategic process the second phase of the strategic process relates determining your brand picture and in developing the brand's picture we learned how to determine brand's image and create the brand's contract and develop a customer model and then we culminated the phase number 2 and got on to phase number 3 which is all about strategy making and in this phase we started with developing a position for the brand and the brand's positioning so to say was the part of departure of the phase which is all about strategy making we then got on to extending the brand and looked into how you can extend the brand in so many different ways and what kind of brand architecture and what kind of portfolios you can have while you go through the process of creating brands and that took us on to choosing the right channels of distribution to leverage the brand and after we were done with the channels of distribution we got on to the topic of the communications which we have finished today and this does not end phase number 3 we still have one more step to learn about and that is about the pricing of the brand pricing in a way that the brand stands leveraged and that basically is the thing of the course and that basically is the core around which the whole brand management revolves so we shall be discussing the pricing in the next lecture Allah half is until then and I look forward to talking with you in the next lecture Thank you very much