Marketing Management, Millenium Edition - epiheirimatikotita.gr

Developing Effective Marketing Communications 273Further analysis helps the company assess the audience’s current image of thecompany, its products, and its competitors. Image is the set of beliefs, ideas, andimpressions that a person holds regarding an object. People’s attitudes and actionstoward an object such as a product or service are highly conditioned by that object’simage. In assessing image, marketers research the audience’s familiarity with the product,then they ask respondents who know the product how they feel about it.If most respondents have unfavorable feelings toward the product, the organizationneeds to overcome a negative image problem, which requires great patiencebecause images persist long after the organization has changed. Once people have acertain image, they perceive what is consistent with that image. It will take highly disconfirminginformation to raise doubts and open their minds—but it can be done.Wolverine World Wide of Rockford, Michigan, discovered this when its Hush Puppiesbrand of casual shoes lost its fashionable image. Then a fashion designer used HushPuppies dyed in bright colors, changing the product’s image from stodgy to avantgarde. Once the “new” Hush Puppies were in demand, sales skyrocketed from lessthan 30,000 to millions of pairs sold in just 2 years. 1Step 2: Determining the Communication ObjectivesKnowing the target audience and its perceptions, the marketing communicator cannow decide on the desired audience response, seeking a cognitive, affective, or behavioralresponse. That is, the marketer might want to put something into the consumer’smind, change an attitude, or get the consumer to act. The four best-known models ofconsumer-response stages are presented in Figure 5-5.Figure 5-5Response Hierarchy Models