SIVA Car Rentals' Marketing Strategy

SIVA car rentals aims to strengthen its customer relationships by providing a 'pick up, drop off' service. The company plans to use integrated marketing communication (IMC) to combine various promotional tools like advertising, direct marketing, and personal selling to increase effectiveness. IMC will help SIVA car rental build customer loyalty, increase sales, and create a competitive advantage.

Question 4
‘Pick you up, Take you back’
SIVA car rentals has innovated their service quality by providing pick up and drop
down to the customers from their location. They have always believed that their customers
deserve a quality service. For this reason the company wants to strengthen their relationship
with the customers by working on the modification of their services. The additional service of
‘pick you up, drop you down’ will be the first step in attracting the customers and shifting
their focus from the competitors (Kitchen and Burgmann 2015: 35).
The company will make use of the simple concept of integrated marketing
communications which ensures that different forms of messages and communications are
connected together. By using the approach of integrated marketing communication SIVA car
rental will combine all the promotional tools of marketing for increasing effectiveness.
Integrated Marketing Communication
Marketing mix contains the 4P’s out of which promotion is one and it has its own set
of communication tools. The efficiency of these communication tools will improve if they are
used together rather than in isolation. The various forms of promotional tools that will be
used by SIVA car rentals are- advertising, direct marketing, personal selling, public relations
and sales promotion. Even though integrated marketing communications need a lot of effort
but it has the ability to provide a number of advantages. The benefits include competitive
advantage and increase in sales and profit and at the same time save time and stress. By using
the approach of integrated marketing communication SIVA car rental will be able to increase
their sale of service which will be appealing to the senior management (Luxton, Reid and
Mavondo 2015: 40).

The aim of using the integrated marketing communication approach is to wrap up
communication around the existing and potential customers to help them move in the various
stages of purchasing process. In this way, SIVA car rental will be able to combine its image
building with that of strengthening the relationship with the customers. It can be observed
that the use of this approach will be attractive for the customers as the internal publics of the
organization will also accept this gladly. This is because the intention of the company was to
build customer relationships and increase sales (Naeem, Bilal and Naz 2013: 130).
Advantages of using IMC
The concept of relationship marketing creates a bond of loyalty and faith with the
customers which can defend them from the predictable assault of competition. If SIVA car
rental succeeds in retaining their customers for a lifetime then that will be biggest and
strongest competitive advantage. The company will also be able to increase their profit
margin by increasing the effectiveness. The company will be able to penetrate the market in
between thousands of other commercial advertisements with their clear, constant and
combined message to reach to the customers (Schultz, Patti and Kitchen 2013).
The integrated marketing communication has the ability to enhance sales by spreading
messages through various tools of communication to provide opportunity to the customers to
become aware before taking purchasing decision. The clear messages that will be conveyed
by the company SIVA car rental will keep the customers updated with relevant information
about special offers and new services to guide them through the buying process. The
messages that will be conveyed by using various promotional tools will make the service
more reliable and convincing. This will lead the customers to stop searching for other options
in the same sector thus reducing the risk for the company to lose their customers and order
the result of brand comparisons (Vernuccio and Ceccotti 2015: 440).