Chapter 12: Pillsbury's IMC Process

An essential part of marketing a product is in Integrated Marketing Communication. This creates a voice of the product and gives it a universal image. For example, when you walk into a supermarket and see this product, if the IMC worked properly, you will hear the marketing jingle from the ad in your mind. A certain product that has had this specific effect on me is Pillsbury so I will run through the steps Pillsbury took to get to this point.

                The first thing Pillsbury had to do was identifying the target audiences and base their campaign around these people. There is no point wasting recourses on customers who aren’t interested in your product in the first place. The next thing Pillsbury did was establish communication objectives. With this they would want to make their customer aware of the product such as with the ad I have added to this blog. These objectives have been very effective due to their importantness down the road. Step three of Pillsbury’s process is setting up the budget and this will ultimately come down to how much they want and need to spend as well as how much exposure they want their product to receive. This can either be expensive or at times rather cheap or even free- such as the Facebook page of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. After the budget is finalized, the company needs to decide what to spend this money on and how much per project. This is step four which is developing the promotion mix. It is imperative that these promotions are effective and draws in customers. The final step, as in any process, is evaluating the promotion mix’s effectiveness and understanding whether or not it is getting the job done. If it is, then you either want to continue the current campaign or possibly add or subtract from it to make it fit what the evaluation said. This is also very important because you don’t want to waste money, but you also don’t want to waste market potential that is out there waiting to be tapped.

                The promotion portion of marketing is very important and something that can’t be overlooked or underestimated. This is one of the four factors that will determine the success of your product and without it, you may lose something that could easily have been gained with better promotion.