Marketing and Management Report: Integrated Marketing Plan

This report delves into the intricacies of marketing and management, exploring the development of a comprehensively-integrated marketing communications plan using both bottom-up and top-down approaches. It analyzes the challenges companies face when dealing with customer feedback loops, emphasizing their importance in understanding customer needs and expectations. Furthermore, the report highlights the significance of customer engagement in fostering brand loyalty and achieving long-term business goals. The report covers essential aspects like target audience analysis, channel selection, content consistency, and the tracking of marketing campaigns. It also addresses the need for businesses to adopt a systematic approach to identify and prioritize customer needs, ensuring that marketing efforts are aligned with customer satisfaction and overall business success. Ultimately, the report emphasizes the importance of creating meaningful customer experiences to drive advocacy, loyalty, and satisfaction.

Running head: MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT 1
Marketing and Management
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

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Marketing and Management
Executive Summary
First, this report will discuss how the firm should draft a comprehensively-integrated
marketing communications plan by applying both bottom-up and top-up approaches. The second
part of this report will seek to examine various challenges companies face when dealing with
“feedback loops” in an attempt to create, plan, and then implement their marketing
communications strategies. In essence, customer feedback loops provide companies with
excellent ways to understand their customers and ensure that services and products offered meet,
and if possible, exceed customer expectations. The final part of this report will outline why it is
essential to get customers involved with the firm and brand.
Introduction
In this scenario, where a marketing research company has given me a short-term
internship, I would follow various approaches to examine the commercial client base using the
current academic research. A bottom-up and top-up marketing approach will be applied.
Notably, a bottom-up marketing approach has no single definition. Instead, it has a few unique
features that differentiate it from the top-down strategy which is regarded as traditional (Batra
and Keller, 2016). As opposed to traditional marketing, where executives are actively involved in
the development of a marketing plan and strategy to sell the firm’s services and products,
bottom-up approach is often engineered by the company’s employees. In brief, employees
identify a particular customer need and develop a marketing strategy that revolves around the
idea.

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Creating a Well-Integrated Marketing Communications Plan
In the modern business world, marketers presented with many choices on where and how
to advertise services and products. Besides traditional approaches, which include direct
marketing and print advertising, there is email marketing, social media sites, and web-based
advertising (Jobber & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). Many businesses are well aware that what works
in, for instance, traditional print marketing, may not work on social media sites or Web, and vise-
versa is also true. While there exists no sure way to develop a fruitful integrated marketing
campaign, businesses can consider various crucial approaches. First, it is important to have a
deep understanding of the target audience. This means that the business should identify the target
audience while also considering both psychographic (attitudes and behaviors) and demographic
factors (Hewett, Rand, Rust, and van Heerde, 2016). As such, the firm will be in a better position
to create the essential messages and pinpoint the best and applicable communication channel.
Besides this, the marketing team should identify the motivation of the target customers, which
media prefer for communication, and so on. All these questions should be answered prior to
creating the integrated marketing strategy. Another approach is to pick channels wisely.
Notably, not all people like Facebook. Likewise, not all people like reading magazines.
The business needs to identify the channels used by customers, the strengths and weaknesses of
the channel, and how the channels will assist in achieving the company’s objectives. Good
marketers should portray ruthlessness in selecting and rejecting Medias to adopt. In fact, it is
wiser to focus on one channel that has been proven to be effective that struggling to use all
channels. Additionally, businesses need to consider adopting a consistent look and everything
should appear as if it originated from the same company. A clear and consistent content should

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also be created. The content should be developed in a way that it can easily be repurposed or
incorporated to fit in various channels or media (Wilson, Zeithaml, Bitner & Gremler, 2016).
Each element of the marketing campaign should be integrated so as to drive the message to the
ultimate target. The marketing agencies or teams should also be monitored to ensure that they are
working in sync. Lastly, the campaigns and coupons should be tracked. In other words, proper
attribution and analytics methods should be applied to understand the company’s conversions
and results.
Challenges when Dealing with Feedback Loops
A good understanding of customer needs is important for market and innovation success.
It has been noted that many businesses do not have a systematic approach to using and finding
needs. According to SiriusDecisions research, many organizations are aware of the vitality of
customer needs (Hartley & Claycomb, 2013). However, two-thirds of these firms lack a
consistent procedure of pinpointing the needs and deciding prioritizing issues. To start with,
many companies are not aware of where to source for customer needs. Many businesses consider
prospects or existing customers as a starting point for unraveling customer needs, sales feedback,
and customer interactions to gather known needs (De Mooij, 2013). While essential, this
approach hinders the company from looking into potential needs of new and current target
customers. In addition to this, businesses are not knowledgeable about how they can get
products, sales, and marketing to come to terms on a collective definition of customer needs.
Often, need is referred to as the “thirst” for a solution or product. This definition, which is
seemingly faulty, creates a myopic and presumptive viewpoint that is concentrated on offering
and thus hinders the comprehension of the full extent of needs evident in every business. This

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impact is mostly seen in messaging that touts the benefits of the product or service rather than
the business value.
Customer Engagement for better Business Performance
Customer engagement entails encouraging customers to share their experiences and
interact with the business and brand. When implemented well, a vibrant customer engagement
approach promotes brand loyalty and growth. Notably, businesses that concentrate on customer
experience consider value creation more important than revenue extraction (Kumar, 2018). They
offer something meaningful to their customers; an excellent customer experience, real-time and
interactive customer support, and exceptional content. It should be noted that customer
experience is priority number one. The experience businesses offer to their customers is essential
as it allows business owners and marketers to increase advocacy, loyalty, and increase
satisfaction. Additionally, it is important for companies to humanize their brands as customers
value the feeling of being attended to and recognized. In brief, customers form the foundation of
every business. This means that the success of a firm is determined by engagement of customers
(Armstrong, Kotler, Harker & Brennan, 2015). The prime aim of a marketing strategy should be
to note and satisfy the needs of customers. Engaging customers in every stage of marketing
ensures that the company offers products and services that satisfy customers, and ultimately, the
business will achieve its long-term goals.
Conclusion
To summarize, the modern business world presents marketers with multiple choices on
where and how to advertise services and products. In addition to traditional approaches, which

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include direct marketing and print advertising, there is email marketing, social media sites, and
web-based advertising. Additionally, as seen in this report, a good understanding of customer
needs is important for market and innovation success. Research has pointed out that many
businesses do not have a well-defined approach to using and finding needs and hence a proper
mechanism needs to be adopted to solve this problem. Lastly, Customer engagement, when
implemented wisely, promotes brand loyalty and hence a significant growth of the business is
seen.

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References
Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M., & Brennan, R. (2015). Marketing: an introduction.
Pearson Education.
Batra, R. and Keller, K.L. (2016). Integrating Marketing Communications: New Findings, New
Lessons, and New Ideas. Journal of Marketing, 80 (November), 6, pp. 122-145;
De Mooij, M. (2013). Global marketing and advertising: Understanding cultural paradoxes.
Sage Publications.
Hartley, R. F., & Claycomb, C. (2013). Marketing mistakes and successes. Wiley.
Hewett, K., Rand, W., Rust, R.T. and van Heerde, H.J. (2016). Brand Buzz in the Echoverse.
Journal of Marketing, 80 (May), 3, pp. 1-24;
Jobber, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012). Principles and practice of marketing (No. 7th).
McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Kumar, V. (2018). A Theory of Customer Valuation: Concepts, Metrics, Strategy, and
Implementation. Journal of Marketing, 82, (January), 1, pp. 1-19.
Wilson, A., Zeithaml, V., Bitner, M. J., & Gremler, D. (2016). Services marketing: Integrating
customer focus across the firm. McGraw Hill.

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