Purpose of the plan
The Vertu Company is based in the UK and has been in the mobile manufacturing and retailing business since the year 1998. There is an urgent need to create an integrated marketing communication plan to ensure that the company remains competitive in its current market expansion strategies for mobile phone products.
The objectives include increasing net proceeds by over thirty percent of sales in the second year of operation, augmenting the firm’s sales to thirty percent in the second year of operation, and attaining customer satisfaction through the provision of services that exceed customers’ expectations in the mobile phones.
Target audience
Benefits or Claim
The selling point of the Vertu Mobile products is that they can be integrated into an offline mobile application. This means that customers will be in a position to use the application on their phones wherever they are without having to worry about the networking environment. Therefore, persons who will purchase these phones will be in a position to constantly connect with their customers and target market. Through a timely appeal to emotions and self-prejudice, the Vertu Mobile products will be packaged to engage the ‘perceived goodness’ and need to identify with ‘the ideal’ in the functionality and deployment within different television, social, and print media advertisements (Birdsall & Johnston, 2010).
Support
These attractive values will be painted as perfect in the various advertisements about the products through the use of bright and powerful communication themes such as universal compatibility with the programming languages such as NET, JavaScript, Client Object Model, and HTML among others. To make this strategy successful, the advertisement message will be modeled on the platform of consistency and direct appeal to the target market (Stokes, 2011). As indicated by the current marketing manager of the company, market penetration for the Vertu products has been possible due to the unique qualities and ability to customize the phones. Therefore, improvement in the current product features is likely to further the current market expansion strategies (Winchester, 2006).
Media
Advertisements are very manipulative and use tactics that directly and involuntarily appeal to the mind of the target person. Usually, advertisements appeal to memory or emotional response. Reflectively, the success of the Vertu Mobile products promotion messages will be deeply entrenched in the principle of keeping a reliable and professional reputation in exchanging ideas and convincing customers. The advertisement message will be presented in two channels, that is, below-the-line and above-the-line.
Under the below-the-line approach, the product will be marketed directly through the print and visual press. On the other hand, under the above-the-line approach, the advertising message will be presented via social media to appeal to the customer segment consisting of the young technological gauchos and digerati (Birdsall & Johnston, 2010). The use of social media to advertise the Vertu Mobile products was informed by the need to;
Attract
The main objective of this digital marketing plan is to attract the younger customers market through the Vertu Mobile products website and a Twitter fun page to sell the mobile phones to customers. The objective aims at packaging the Vertu Mobile products as a favourite of the younger customers who frequent social media and share a common technological culture (Stokes, 2011). Apparently, this segment forms the largest bracket of those who will use mobile phones.
Customer retention and loyalty building
Properly modified Vertu Mobile products website and the Twitter fun page will reassure the customers on quality. Through massive recruitment of Vertu Mobile products funs in the Twitter page, the company will not only benefit from increased traffic of online compliments but also record high rates of customer loyalty as most customers are influenced by reactions from other clients. A customer retention strategy is meant to position the company as a market leader in terms of customer satisfaction tracking and response (Farris, Bendle, Pfeifer, & Rebstein, 2010). This will be achieved through the optimisation of the Vertu Mobile products website’s search engine.
Promotion and points of sale
Since the Vertu Mobile products are based on the B2B model, the company’s promotion and advertising activities will include the usage of all marketing tools of B2B. With its decided joint partner strategy, the company will recruit a marketing company that will have the responsibility of marketing the mobile phones. This strategy is likely to be successful since the contracted company will have better knowledge of the industry, requirements, and approach to minimize conflict as a result of different perceptions (Stokes, 2011).
Key Insight
Since the current distribution channel is already developed and the Lush brand preference stable, the objective is very realistic since marketing resources (distribution patterns) are fully operational to facilitate a market exercise on target and segmenting position for the Lush brand. The market share increase is to be realized within twenty-four months with periodic updates activated after every month to facilitate progress and success measurement against projections of the market share expansion objective (Stokes, 2011).
Public relations play a significant role in providing the support required for the implementation of the marketing plan. In this case, public relations will help in promoting and establishing the products as environmentally friendly. Public relations will also help in creating a favourable reputation for the company by publicizing news about events that take place in the company. Hence, public relations will facilitate informing the community about the company’s corporate social responsibility as a way of trying to win its trust (Farris et al. 2010).
Conclusion
Marketing strategy is essential before actualising projections from a blueprint. This plan functions on the margins of informed decision-making after comprehensive research on the viability and sustainability of a product. A properly integrated marketing communication plan should create minimal disturbances in the market and the company. Thus, the Vertu Company will be in a position to further penetrate the market and ensure that its business is sustainable.
Reference List
Birdsall, C, & Johnston, N 2010, “Achieving brand-driven business success,” Design Management Review, vol. 19 no. 2, pp. 67-74.
Farris, P, Bendle, N, Pfeifer, P, & Rebstein, D 2010, Marketing metrics: The definitive guide to measuring marketing performance, FT Press, Alabama.
Stokes, R 2011, eMarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing, Quirk eMarketing (Pty) Ltd, London.
Winchester, M 2006, “Positive and negative brand beliefs and brand defection/uptake.” European Journal of Marketing, vol. 42 no. 6, pp. 553-570.