IMC Hawks Blog

Tag: IMC

  • IMC and You: How to Increase Your Chances of Getting a Job After Graduation

    For many of us in Advanced IMC, graduation is looming on the horizon. With the end of our college careers approaching, we are beginning to hunt for jobs in a less than promising market. We’ll be competing with thousands of other new graduates for a limited number of positions, and since we don’t want to be asking “Do you want fries with that” in six months we’ve got to get creative; IMC, or Integrated Marketing Communications, can help!

    Typically, IMC combines practices from public relations, marketing, and advertising to coordinate all forms of communication delivered by an organization or product. IMC campaigns require a lot of work and effort, however, the differences between a regular marketing campaign and an IMC campaign are vast. If done properly IMC creates a competitive advantage that boosts sales and profits, while saving time and stress. Just what we need as we look for our first “big kid” jobs!

    Once upon a time, marketing’s 4 Ps (product, price, place, and promotion) could be applied by new graduates seeking employment. You, the product, would promote yourself by sending out your resume to the places you wished to work. Following that, you would be called in for an interview and (hopefully) be offered a job; from there you could negotiate your price. This is a simplified version, but you get the idea. In today’s competitive job market this isn’t enough.

    The practice of IMC has shifted us away from the 4 Ps and has adopted the 4 Cs: consumer, cost, convenience, and communication. What does this have to do with finding a job in the less than stellar market? Everything!

    No longer can you focus on selling yourself, the product. Today one has to think about what they can offer the consumer, your potential employer. What are their wants and needs and do you match up to something they would want to invest in? In today’s economy, their choice to invest in you may be dependent on cost. Cost doesn’t just involve your wage; it also includes any time spent training or covering moving expenses, etc. This brings me to the next C: convenience. You have to make yourself easily accessible to potential employers; whether it be physically or virtually. The final of the four Cs is communication. Your resume isn’t enough to land you a job. Do you have any connections that could help you out? Word of mouth can do wonders when searching for a job. If a potential employer Google’s you, are they going to find anything interesting that you’ve written or participated in? There are a myriad of ways for you to communicate who you are beyond your resume.

    -Eliza Wadson

  • “I want to be an event planner!”

    Contrary to popular belief, event planning isn’t all white dresses and fancy cakes.  In the realm of IMC, events are everywhere. From trade shows to music festivals, it takes knowledge of budgeting, marketing, advertising, organizational planning, and more to carry out a successful event. Our education in Communication Studies gives us a head start on other event planning hopefuls by providing opportunities through the classroom, internships, and extracurricular activities.

    Dress for Success Fashion Show Logo
    2010 "Dress for Success" Fashion Show Logo

    At UNCW, students have the opportunity to assist in the planning of fashion shows, academic conferences and meetings, concerts, multiple charity functions, and fundraisers. These opportunities give us valuable insight into all the necessary components of event planning. We come to understand that it takes hard work and long hours, excellent writing and public speaking skills…the list goes on and on! At the end of the day, an IMC student evaluates the outcome of his or her efforts not by how happy Bridezilla was, but by how it changed the behaviors of the client. For example, the success of a charity event might be measured by an increase in donations, not by how much people enjoyed the show.

    UNCW Communication Studies Society raised over $5,000 for breast cancer research in October 2010!

    When searching through the thousands of job listings, there are a variety of titles to consider: conference coordinator, special event coordinator, and meeting manager to name a few. Dependent upon the more specific interests of the applicant, these titles can start you on your way to a career in event planning!

    -Tiffany Evans, Deji Adeleke, Anna Kate Babnik, Katie Eagle, Carissa Niederkorn

  • Healthy Competition

    Ever heard of the term “Healthy Competition?” Well perhaps instead of seeing competition as a driving negative force behind brands going head to head in their advertisements (i.e PCvsMAC or PEPSIvsCOKE), we as consumers actually get an insight into a wider variety of products that we can choose to purchase/support.

    First, let’s look at the how competition helped, rather than hurt, pepsi/coke in these advertisements.

    Coke zero was implemented into markets in 2006, starting out in western Europe. Considering it is still in stores, selling out shelves and soda machines is not only encouraging, but motivating! Just after two years of selling and marketing this new Coke product, sales went up 34% from when Zero began! USA Today reports, “Men are about 45% of Diet Coke drinkers but about 55% of Coke Zero buyers. It has a stronger, more Coke Classic-like flavor and seems to be holding onto Male customers who’ve become more calorie-conscious with age but still want more flavor than most diet colas.”

    Seeing the success in Coke Zero, Pepsi knew that such a strong competitor couldn’t go unnoticed. While PepsiMAX was created in 1993, Pepsi took action in response to Coke Zero’s success, as they strategically changed their name “Diet Pepsi” to “PepsiMAX” in 2009. These advertisements prove that the two companies have the exact same product, can cause argument between better tastes, but ultimately, they are putting each other in the spotlight for the consumer to decide for themselves.

    Also, PC got their fair share of shots from MAC, with the MACvsPC commercials featuring Justin Long and John Hodgman.

    MAC took focus on how much “cooler”, more “Attractive”, more “Stylish” and efficient their models were to PC. One can’t deny that these commercials weren’t strategic, effective, and fun to watch, but they were so hard to touch on PC’s weaknesses that Window’s gained enough strength to improve and implement an entire new Vista system.

    It mimics the idea of MAC’s leopard operating system, all while adding non-mac features like the tablet touch screen, TV recorder, and WiFi with WPA 2 support. But what did MAC do in return? Welcome, Snow Leopard.

    So hopefully we see now that competition is nothing short of evoking advancements in every product/line in the business. Competition helps business’s not only thrive upon existing technology, but drive improvements and innovations in this evolving economy.

    -Maxann Keller

  • [Black & Yellow] VS. [Green & Yellow]

    Thanks to the infamous song “Black and Yellow” by notorious rap artist Wiz Khalifa, the Pittsburgh Steelers find themselves with a bit of a theme song going into their seventh super bowl appearance this weekend. Khalifa is a Pittsburgh native who wrote the song to represent the main colors of the sports teams of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This interesting method of branding the city of Pittsburgh through the city’s athletic team’s main colors has brought a lot of attention to the Pittsburgh Steelers now that they are playing in the Super Bowl once more.

    Branding has been a driving force within the confines of IMC since the mid 1980’s when competition among products began to drastically increase. Without branding, a car is just a car, a school is just a school, and a football team is just a football team. There is no room for differentiation and no reason for a consumer to choose one over the other.  Each individual brand demands the support of loyal customers, and in this case, fans. Placing such emphasis on the color of the teams creates a more recognizable brand. Just upon hearing the words “black and yellow” fans feel a sense of ownership and camaraderie.

    Just to stimulate things even more, their opponent’s main colors are Green & Yellow. The Green Bay Packers are just as historic, prolific, and nationally recognized as the Steelers and naturally one could anticipate that it would only be a matter of time before imitations and remixes of the song “Black and Yellow” would be replaced with “Green and Yellow.” Sure enough, one of the most famous remixes has been done by two young men known as Pizzle and Prophetic titled “Green and Yellow” (See video below). The video already has garnered over 200,000 views on YouTube in just its second week. As this intense and historic competition between the two cities escalates, sides will be chosen with the question, “Black & Yellow or Green & Yellow?”

    -Katie Eagle, Deji Adeleke, Anna Kate Babnik, Tiffany Evans, and Carissa Niederkorn

  • Tablet here, tablet there, tablets everywhere!

    What in the world is a tablet? Last I checked, tablets were being used in the Flinstones to share information and, somewhere along in the Bible, Moses used them to share everyone’s favorite commandments.

    It all started with a device known as the Kindle. A simple, yet very effective e-reader created by Amazon. Its target market audience was certainly specialized in the sense that the only people purchasing this product would be those that could see the Kindle aiding in their avid reading habits. Then something happened. Technology-friendly giant Apple revealed to the world the iPad: basically a really, really ginormous iPhone. And what a success it has been. The iPad has sold over 2 million units. That translates to an iPad being sold every 3 seconds. Apple knew exactly the amount of lure and desire its iPad product would have on its loyal Apple customers because, as you may know, it costs a company five times as much to attract a new customer rather than to invest in the loyalty of its current customers. The amount of marketing and advertising that Apple has done for the iPad has exceeded well beyond any other tablet competitor on the market. The way they advertised it was also pretty ingenious. They marketed their product by showing the relevance of the iPad and how similar its functioning was to a laptop and PC; but it is perceived as cooler, sleeker, and geared towards the ever-evolving, fast paced, give-it-to-me-now technological society.

    So naturally, with the success of the iPad, came the injection of other technology giants to capitalize on this groundbreaking movement that somehow seems to be the next phase in this apparently unstoppable migration from big, clunky PCs to sleek, portable tablets.

    At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an unprecedented 45 new tablets were unveiled as being in the developing stages or already being moved into production. This mass influx of tablets is going to prove to be quite the competition for these companies as they begin to advertise and market their products towards consumers. One of the most important questions that all of these corporations are going to have answer is, “Why would someone need a tablet if they already have a laptop?” Apple seems to have already answered this question with the amount of exclusive user friendly applications designed specifically for their tablet that literally, cannot be accessed on any other device.Relevance and receptivity are going to be major components of the five Rs (relevance, receptivity, response, recognition, and relationship) of IMC that need to be addressed by companies somersaulting into the tablet arena. When will customers and prospects be most receptive to advertisements about tablets and at what point of brand contact will the customer be most receptive to the incentive to buy a tablet?

    It is going to be quite interesting to see how the market changes with this upcoming inoculation of tablets. Technology establishments will need to pay close attention to aggregation to determine just how many of their consumers are likely to jump on the tablet bandwagon. Instead of using segmentation to break down customers into different demographics, aggregation will allow companies to determine what exactly it is that customers do and how their behavior in the marketplace determines whether or not they will purchase a tablet. It was popular back in Fred Flinstone’s era; let’s see what happens in the next couple of years.

    -Deji Adeleke, Anna Kate Babnik, Katie Eagle, and Tiffany Evans

  • Looking Forward to Advanced IMC

    It’s that time of year again!

    It is officially 2011 and spring semester classes across the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s campus have begun. Last semester we caught a glimpse of Dr. Persuit’s Corporate Communication class and what they had to say. This semester, the blog is back up and running with the class that originated it all, Advanced Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC), but with new students and new insights.

    For all of our new subscribers and readers, you may ask, what exactly is Integrated Marketing Communication? Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) recognizes the importance of strategic planning to reach all businesses, customers, employees, as well as communities. Public relations and advertising are critical categories of IMC, along with promotions, event planning and marketing communications. IMC, so to speak, integrates all of these promotional tools and resources so that they can work hand-in-hand with one another.

    In this class, the projects and teamwork we will encounter will make us more knowledgable in the specified field and expand our resume and skill set.  This semester, we will be discussing topics anywhere from the Superbowl to careers in IMC.  We look forward to your comments and appreciate the feedback! ENJOY!

  • Does the word “corporate” in a job title mislead people?

    How are careers in corporate communication defined exactly? What kind of careers are even designated to the field of corporate communication?

    Jobs and professions in today’s society are categorized much more specifically by their titles than just being a doctor, dentist, blacksmith, plumber, or teacher. For example, careers that fall under the category of corporate communication are: corporate communications director, corporate communications specialist, internal corporate communications specialist, corporate communications/public relations manager, and corporate communications coordinator. What does all this mean? From the job title alone, it is hard to know what exactly the job description is and what it will consist of.

    Careers in corporate communication can be linked to jobs in public relations, advertising, integrated marketing communication and other related fields in communication studies. If you are searching for a job in any of these fields, don’t be afraid by the word “corporate” if it is in the job title. Society has given emotion to the word, corporate. It is made out to be this tough, professional, dictating vocation where everyone walks around in blue and grey suits all day. Yes, in reality there are people that wear blue and grey suits daily, but those are popular business colors. But, in all actuality, the word corporate is defined as “belonging to a corporation or company; pertaining to a united group.” Therefore, when a company assigns a job title with the words “corporate communication” in it, they are most likely informing people that they are looking for someone who can handle the specific communication tasks between many people either within their own corporation or with outside corporations whom they do business with. These companies are looking for people who can perform the needed skills in the public relations and advertising fields for a large company, not a small, local business for instance.

    -Danielle Dorantich