Integrated Marketing Communication Essay On Consumer Behaviour.

Discussion

Discuss about the Integrated Marketing Communication on Consumer Behaviour.

The Australia Wildlife is a tour company operating in Australia with four unique brands. It offers one of the most interactive and diverse experiences of wild life in Australia. The company offers couple, family or group and even to the backpacker. The company offers to the travelers from all over the world with such a mesmerizing experience of tourism. It offers authentic experience to the passionate travelers. The company is positioned itself to meet the growing demand by providing the customized wildlife experiences. The company has been positioned to display the untouched and spectacular destinations in the South Australia and in the Western Australia for the past fifteen years. The target market of the company are mainly the passionate travelers, group and family, couple and targets the people from all over the world. The target market come across all the ages, origin, income levels but they share a common attitude to travel, everyday life and personal development (Australianwildlifeadventures.com.au, 2016).

The communication strategy is to be developed for supporting the welfare of animals and its role in improving the national standards and communicating the working group activities in the animals sectors.

The communication strategy targets and focuses on the issues concerning animal welfare and developing sustainably. The targeted audience for the communication strategy are the participants in the strategy, regulator and developers of the animal welfare policies. Other target audience includes the users and managers of animals. The primary audience includes the stakeholders of the company who are working on the strategy implementation (Bruhn & Ahlers, 2013). A vast range of stakeholders would be covered under this strategy such as associations, working group participants and the consumers groups, businesses. The secondary audience would include those who are not directly involved in the implementation of the strategy. These includes animal welfare bodies, government, consumers, transporters, processors and animal owners.

The communication strategy has very broad objectives of improving the communication between the public on the issues concerning the animal welfare and the progress of the mission to make the sustainable development for the welfare of the animals. The activities involving the communication would target both the external stakeholders, internal participants and the travelers (Blakeman, 2014).

The various objectives of communication are listed down below:

• Understanding and meeting the needs of the welfare of the animals and enabling the people to make the ethical decisions concerning the welfare of animals. This should be supported by their knowledge and skills.
• One of the core objective of the communication strategy is facilitate improved communication between the associations, consumer groups and businesses.
• Engaging Australia in developments and international partnership to improve the welfare of animals.
• Generating active and balanced debate about the issues concerning welfare of animals
• Increasing understanding and knowledge of Australians about the importance of the animal welfare
• Ensuring that the stakeholders of Australian wildlife adventure are kept updated about the activities and progress of the activities
• Ensuring that there are output generation and consistent communication activities to keep the company on the agenda and providing incentives to the participants so that they are actively engaged in the process (Cornelissen, 2014).
• Demonstrating the importance of the collaboration and the ownership of the company.
• Motivating the participants by facilitating it to deliver on the strategy.

The following messages will help in improving the communication between the participants of the communication strategy

• A framework would be provided by the communication strategy to work collaboratively so that the sustainable improvements in the welfare of animals are delivered.
• The pathway for the people who are interested and the infrastructure is provided by the communication strategy of animal welfare. Such facilities are provided if the people concerned needs it
• In order to increase the outcome and improve the legislation consistency, the welfare strategy of the company, the government would take on the leadership role, coordination, and perspective. This would also help increasing the efficiency in the expenditures by reducing the duplication of the efforts involved (Ham et al., 2012).
• The changes in the practice and the standards of the animal welfare cannot happen overnight. This is provided by the welfare communication strategy of the company by means of the series of goals and the stakeholders are making progress against that
• The state government and the territories are emphasizing on facilitating the collaborative and national activities to activities involved
• The participants of the communication strategy of the Australian wildlife adventures are committed in continuously improving the animal welfare and are making a key difference in addressing the issues regarding the welfare of animals
• The sectorial working groups of the Australian wildlife adventures are driving changes in the community. The cross-sectorial working groups provide the valuable contribution and contribution is in the area of research and development, training and education and communications (Kasper & Kellerman, 2014).

Explanation of target market and product positioning

There are also broader messages, which would filter through the public aiming to create awareness and build confidence that the issues concerning the welfare of animals are being addressed. The messages are so that it would appeal to the audience

• Australians are committed to improve the welfare of the animals and they value animals. The welfare of wildlife is the concern and issue for all the Australians
• The practice of improving the animal welfare is long-term process and the progress is being made. There always exist the scope of doing in a better way (Castells,2013).
• Sustainability should be incorporated in improving the animal welfare or wildlife welfare. The activities of the communication strategy are such that it supports the participants in improving the welfare of the animals
• Animals have intrinsic value and they are culturally, economically and socially important for Australia.

There is a need of developing the communication protocol, which would provide the guide to develop the communication product and the content to promote the animal welfare strategy of the Australian wildlife adventure. This would include the content development, key messages for the media liaison and the tools, which would help in publicizing the working activities of the communication strategy.

The activities that are being undertaken by the communication welfare strategy of Australian wildlife adventure would be promoted by using the platform of media. As per the requirements, a distribution list of media is need to be created, researched and updated. As the communication products are developed and rolled out, there is a need to allocate the additional funding to allow for an increase in the additional search words and generation of the clips as well. The social media platforms such as Facebook and twitter would be examined by the communication strategy. These platforms could be established to communicate the activities that are being under taken by the company. The information being released by the company about the strategy can be informed to the stakeholders by tweeting the links and the video case and media releases can be posted on the Facebook. The platform can also be used to inform the participants about the topical issues concerning the welfare of animals (Thorson & Moore, 2013).

Websites and the e-newsletter are other social media platform. The e newsletter are used to produce the preview stories and communicate the achievements. The media are also used to provide the tips and plan for managing the welfare of animals in a better way. The editions would contain the short stories by providing links along with the additional information. The stakeholders of the company would be provided with the newsletter and the same can be posted on the websites of the company (Richards, 2013).

Websites- Websites can be regarded as the central repository for all the outputs and the activities of communication and it would be the focal point of the developed information about the communication strategy. The pilot website consist of the information about the projects undertaken, information about the strategy developed by the company, sectorial and cross-sectorial working groups. The complete site would be developed by rolling out the strategy of the communications and benchmarking the traffic flow (Mihart, 2012).

Explanation of the communication objectives

The above three platforms of the social media would be chosen for communicating the strategy about the animal welfare of Australian wildlife adventure. Choosing these platforms would help the company in providing the public with the additional touch points to make them engage on the issues of the animal welfare. The activities undertaken by the company as a part of the communication strategy is implemented using the social media platform such as Facebook, twitter, websites along with the newsletter. The social media platform is difficult to control by its very nature and the strategy concerning the social media is to be developed for setting up the accounts of social networking sites. This would establish clear guidelines by assigning the responsibility to the people who are responsible for responding to the comments, updating the sites. It can be regarded as the part of the infrastructure strategy (Neirotti, 2012).

Most of the promotion strategy and advertising involve spending money; the amount has to be determined. The amount that would go to the online social media, promotional contest and advertisement needs to be planned specifically. The budgets also needs to account for something that is not expected. The budget needs to be built for developing the communication strategy. The expenses of the communication strategy is attributable to the fees and expenses. The budget would include the cost of different thing that is involved in developing and implementing the communication strategy.

communication strategy implementation budget of Australian wildlife adventure
Activity	Fees ($)	Expenses ($)	Total ($)
website content management	3200	0	3200
communication product	4321	0	4321
E-newsletter (source,draft,update)	2120	0	2120
evaluating communication activities	1630	0	1630
website hosting	0	456	456
Domain registration	324	0	324
updating social media	5340	0	5340
sub total	16935	456	17391
Phone, stationary and fax	0	6221	6221
Total Budget			23612

Table depicting budget

Source: (created by author)

It include the cost of website content management and site domain and hosting registration. The cost relating to the development of the communication products are also included. The expenses relating to the e- newsletter such as sourcing, drafting, updating the list of editions forms a part of the budget. Some other expenses arises from the workshop to be conducted. It involves the fees for drafting the conference report. The budget includes the expenses arising from the fortnightly work in progress meetings, circulating, and updating the documents of work in progress (Ferrell & Hartline, 2012).

The Australian wildlife adventure is committed towards developing the objectives that are attainable, measurable, relevant time bound and specific. For each of the communication objectives set out in the communication strategy, the company has set the performance indicators. There are several measures taken by company, which would depict deliver and the continual development of the information of the animal welfare. The success is also depicted by the successful sharing of the resources between the group of stakeholders, program development for exchanging the ideas and reaching consensus on the key issues (Quirke, 2012). The evaluation measures are as follows:

Tools	Evaluation measures
Social media	The number of friends on Facebook and the followers on Twitter measures the success. This is determined by the policy of the social media.
website	Here, success is measured by looking at the total number of hits to the websites, whether there is unique browser and the number of page reviews. The company will determine this following the completion of the pilot site
Communication products	The measures include the number of pages hit, click thoughts and uniqueness of browsers.

Table showing evaluation measures

Source: (created by author)

Conclusions:

The communication strategy is developed for managing the tourism wildlife interactions. There is a need of increased commitment form the government for effectively managing the wildlife tourism. The budget consideration with the communication strategy of Australian wildlife adventures would include all the fees and expenses relating to the promotion, advertising of the activities. It includes the expenses attributable to the social media platform that are used to communicate the activities that the company undertakes in addressing the issues of animal welfare and environmental sustainability. The success of the company concerning to this strategy is depicted by the popularity of the websites and the number of the visits and pages liked by the participants and the stakeholders of the company.

Reference:

Australianwildlifeadventures.com.au. (2016). Australian Wildlife Adventures. [online] Available at: https://australianwildlifeadventures.com.au/ [Accessed 10 Nov. 2016].

Blakeman, R. (2014). Integrated marketing communication: creative strategy from idea to implementation. Rowman & Littlefield.

Bruhn, M., & Ahlers, G. M. (2013). Integrated communication in the innovation process: an approach to integrated innovation communication. In Strategy and Communication for Innovation (pp. 139-160). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Castells, M. (2013). Communication power. OUP Oxford.

Cornelissen, J. (2014). Corporate communication: A guide to theory and practice. Sage.

Ferrell, O. C., & Hartline, M. (2012). Communication strategy, text and cases. Nelson Education.

Ham, S. H., & Weiler, B. (2012). Interpretation as the centerpiece of sustainable wildlife tourism. Sustainable Tourism. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 35-44.

Kasper, G., & Kellerman, E. (2014). Communication strategies: Psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Routledge.

Lin, C. A., & Atkin, D. J. (Eds.). (2014). Communication technology and social change: Theory and implications. Routledge.

Luxton, S., Reid, M., & Mavondo, F. (2015). Integrated marketing communication capability and brand performance. Journal of Advertising, 44(1), 37-46.

Mihart, C. (2012). Impact of integrated marketing communication on consumer behaviour: Effects on consumer decision-making process. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 4(2), 121.

Moyle, B. D., Weiler, B., & Croy, G. (2013). Visitors’ perceptions of tourism impacts bruny and magnetic islands, Australia. Journal of Travel Research, 52(3), 392-406.

Neirotti, L. D. (2012). and Adventure Tourism. Sport and adventure tourism, 1.

Quirke, M. B. (2012). Making the connections: using internal communication to turn strategy into action. Gower Publishing, Ltd..

Richards, M. (2013). Global Nature, Global Brand: Bbc Earth and David Attenborough's Landmark Wildlife Series. Media International Australia, 146(1), 143-154.

Singhal, A., & Rogers, E. (2012). Entertainment-education: A communication strategy for social change. Routledge.

Thorson, E., & Moore, J. (2013). Integrated communication: Synergy of persuasive voices. Psychology Press.