Department of MarketingAssignment

Session: 2015/2016

Semester: Semester 2

Degree: MSc International Marketing

Class Code/Title: MK994 – Integrated Marketing

Communication

Class Coordinator: Dr Nusa Fain

Assignment (Individual or Group): Individual

Submission Deadline: Thursday, 5 May 2016 at 12.00pm

Student Name: Charachada Dechkriengkraikun

Introduction

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Interflora is recognized as the largest flower delivery network in UK and Ireland for

over 90 years. Since 1923, the concept of interflora were brought from America to UK at the

first time and later internationalize to other 140 countries which accounting for 40,000 florist

shops around the world. In addition to physical shops, Interflora’s website represent great

range of product varieties which allow customers make an online purchase.

Interflora brand’s stand for trusted, personal touch and WOW! Experience. The brand

emphasize on fast delivery and excellent personal touch service. Each bouquet was designed

perfectly by expert florists and hand-delivered to customers with great care. Moreover, the

brand promise to give best quality of flowers by offer 7 days guarantee of freshness.

Therefore, customers could ask for refund when there are dissatisfaction from recipients or

late delivery. All of these messages are obviously associated with Interflora brand identity

including iconic Mercury Figure, ‘Interflora’ word mark, and ‘the flower experts’ strapline.

All consistent elements make the brand stand out in market place.

Although Interflora is the brand leader, it does not stop searching new opportunities to

sales more flowers. Recently, the brand try to boost young consumers’ awareness of

grandparents’ day because they believe that this day is a perfect flower gifting occasion.

Unfortunately, UK Youngers have low awareness about Grandparents’ day. Therefore, this

essay aims to create effective integrated marketing communications (IMC) campaign plan for

Interflora related to Grandparents’ day. The essay represents four parts including analysis of

the creative brief, recommendation for IMC campaign, campaign’s communication

evaluation method, and conclusion respectively.

Part I: Analysis of the creative brief

2.1 Company Background

Interflora provide clear information in terms of their type of business, brand

positioning, organization value, unique selling points (USPs), promises, and top three target

segments (Alpha Territory, Professional rewards, and Careers and kids). Recently, Interflora

start to think of campaign to increase young adults’ awareness of Grandparents’ Day in UK.

However, it would be even better to provide some additional information about

previous campaign and the result in the brief. These are the following previous successful

campaign that could be add to project brief.

2.1.1 Interflora’s Twitter Campaign: Saying it with Flowers!

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This is a social media campaign designed to strengthen the brand’s relationship with

online communities (Shearman, 2010). In September 2010, Interflora monitored daily tweets,

@InterfloraUK, looking for users who appeared glum (George, 2010). Once found, the users

were contacted directly and sent a surprise bouquet of flowers to cheer them up.

2.1.2 Interflora ‘the Power of Flowers’

This is another digital campaign which blooms just in time for Mother’s Day. In 2015,

the campaign used powerful emotional 30-second ad to reflect on the many reasons to send

flowers to mom on Mother’s Day (Mccarthy, 2015). Overall, it designed to communicate that

Interflora’s flowers is the perfect gift for mom.

2.1.3 Surprise Someone Special (SurpriseFlowers campaign)

In 2014, Interflora decided to partner with ITV’s Surprise Surprise to launch

SurpriseFlowers campaign (Jamiet, 2014). The campaign asking the Great British public to

recommend their friend or family member who deserves to receive stunning Interflora

flowers, hand-delivered by Mark Wright, the TV star (Jamiet, 2014).

2.2 Problems and opportunities (Situation analysis)

Interflora is the market leader of flower delivery in UK market for long time.

However, the competition in flower delivery market become more intense over time as many

high street brand began to enter the market. Therefore, it is necessary to established good

relationship with customers and reach new consumers to protect the market share. For most

of flower delivering company, Christmas, Valentine’s, and Mother’s Day are the peak period

of flower gifting. Besides those periods, Interflora aware of opportunity of Grandparents’

Day as another opportunities for flower gifting occasion. However, UK people still have low

awareness of Grandparents’ Day. Therefore, the brand attempt to boost awareness of

Grandparents’ Day to young consumers as they feel that it is a perfect occasion to boost sales

and reach new consumers (young adults). At the same time, the brand should also beware of

their own demand and capacity management to avoid negatives world of mouth as in

Mother’s Day resulting from failure of maintaining standards and quality control (Dailymail,

2016). The summary of situation analysis summarizes in table below (Table 1).

Table 1: Inteflora’s SWOT

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2.3 Objective of campaign and expected response

According to the brief, the main objective is to increase younger consumers’

awareness of Grandparents’ day together with promote Interflora brand and product range.

As it mentioned in brand value, Interflora expected to see wow reaction from customers. This

objective reflect the main idea of what they want to achieve, however, it is not specific

enough thus make it difficult to evaluate the campaign’s result. According to (Pickton and

Broderick, 2005, p. 421), the good objective should be SMARRTT (specific, measurable,

achievable, realistic, relevant, targeted, and timed). Therefore, the objective in brief should be

demonstrate clear and precise goals which easy for evaluating the campaign result. The new

objectives could be set as following.

Objectives

To increase young adults awareness of grandparents’ day compare with last year day

compare with last year.

To increase Interflora’s sales by 20 percent compare with Grandparents’ Day in last

year (2015).

70 percent of young adult and grandparents who receive wow experience from

Interflora during grandparents’ day, spread the positive word of mouth through offline

and online channel.

To obtain at least 2000 new visitors from digital media such as official website,

Facebook, and Twitter after Grandparents’ day.

2.4 Target audience

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In general, Interflora emphasized on top 3 segments which has substantial income

such as Alpha territory, professional rewards, and careers and kids. However, the target

groups of Grandparents’ day campaign is UK young adults who visit their grandparents less

often due to living in distance place or having a busy lifestyle. In my point of views, the

target audience is well defined. Although, UK consists of four countries, it is not necessary to

divided UK in to four sub segments and adopt different marketing campaign. Due to sharing

many similarity customs, adopting similar IMC strategies across 4 countries could be more

cost effective and create consistent message. The segmentation, target audience, and

positioning (STP) of Interflora summarizes in the table below (Table1).

Table 1: STP of Interflora

Part II: Recommendation for IMC campaign

Integrated Marketing communication (IMC) is defined as one elements of marketing

mix, namely, promotion (Kotler, 2006; McCarthy, 1996). It is the process of integrating all

marketing communication activities (promotional mix) across relevant audience point to

achieve greater brand coherence (Pickton, and Broderick, 2005, p. 26). Generally, traditional

marketing communications includes five elements, namely, advertising, personal selling,

sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing (McCarthy, 1996). Besides traditional

marketing activities, using cyber marketing (Online media) should be integrated with other

marketing communication tools since it is cost efficient, real time, and interactive (Pickton,

and Broderick, 2005; Peltier, Schibrowsky, and Schultz, 2003). Moreover, 74 percent of

Great Britain young adults consume new brand content via digital channels (National

Readership Survey, 2015).

Many companies combines communication channels to promote brand concept, give

consistent product information, managing customer relationships (Duncan, 2002; Shimp,

2002; Kotler et al, 1999). Using multiple media class and media vehicle could make company

reach wider target audience resulting in high media impact (Pickton, and Broderick, 2005, p,

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471). Moreover, customer perceived the messages delivered from different communication

tools as the single message thus IMC should be used to create consistency and reduce

consumer confusion (Schultz, Tannenbaum, and Lauterborn, 1993). Finally, all

communication channels has its own advantages and disadvantages (Sunday and Bayode,

2011). Therefore, it is important to select and combine appropriate one to gain synergies

effects thus enhance profit and compensate for disadvantages of each channels and (Nielsen,

2009).

Advantages and disadvantages of each promotional tools (Sunday and Bayode, 2011)

This section suggest IMC campaign which aims to boost awareness of Grandparents’

Day and promote Interflora brand to younger consumer in UK, namely, Dear grandparents

with love.

Campaign “Dear grandparents with love”

These is the Integrated marketing communication campaign which aims to create

young adults awareness of Grandparents’ Day together with interflora brand. First, using

advertising to create emotional response towards grandparents. Then, creating event “flower

design competition” which grandparents and young adults could have fun together on

Grandparent’s Day thus enhance the family relationship. In this event, participants must team

up with one of their grandparents and create wonderful Interflora boutique within one hour.

Third, using sell promotion to stimulate purchasing intention by design special grandparent’s

boutique and sell at 20 percent discount price. Finally, using public relation to create

company goodwill by upload the event’s VDO clip on e-media, donating a portion of profit

from event to disable elders, and give publicity to media about Interflora campaign and

mention that it is a perfect time the to say thank you to your grandparents.

1.1 Advertising

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Objective: 1) To create awareness of Grandparents’ day and Interflora.

2) To persuade people to attend the upcoming events

Time frame: 1 September to 1 October, 2016

According to AIDA, DAGMAR, and ATR model, creating awareness is the most

important stage since it will bring following sequence of customer behaviors such as interest,

desire, comprehension, conviction, trial, reinforcement, and finally action (Pickton and

Broderick, 2005, p, 86). Manickam (2014) found that advertising trough outdoor, TV, print,

and internet could create high impact to customer awareness.

Actions: First, company could use television, posters, mobile billboard, and e-media as media

class to launch Interflora advertising which create awareness of Grandparent’s Day. Ads

create emotional response that making people miss their grandparents. Moreover, it could use

the same media classes to announce information and persuade young adults to attend

upcoming event “Flora Design Competition”. Table 2 and 3 would related media type to

media objectives and expected cost, respectively.

Table 2: Media and objectives

Table 3: estimated cost of advertising

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1) Use different media class (Reach)2) use each media class more than 1 time

(frequency)3) R X F get higher impact

All of these traditional and digital media should combine and link together to provide

best possible attention. All of these media would provide consistent information about

campaign’s condition such as place, time, and prize and also the link to register page. After

registration, participants would get multimedia invitation cards which is a requirement to

attend the event. According to Pickton, and Broderick (2005), multimedia combines different

format such as text, picture, video, and music into single medium which is considered as

more exciting forms than simple invitation card.

Example of transported- billboard (Bicycle): This type of billboard could generate more

attention to people. Moreover, some people might record the VDO clip and post in on social

media.

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Media buying

If Interflora is interest in more than 1 media vehicles in each media class, CPT

could be used to calculate cost efficiency and select the cheapest one .

Multimedia invitation includes

- emotional video : child grow up and have happy time with their grandparents

- soft music

- invitation detail

- slow flower falling animation

Terms and conditions for participating

1) Participants should have age 18 and over, team up with grandparents

2) Competition is not open to professional working florists

3) Participants should visit flora design competition webpage and register before 30

October 2016 to attend the event

4) The winner would get free family trip to Newyork and 100 pound Interflora voucher.

5) Five percent of profit from food, drink, gift shop, and flower shop at the events would

be donated to disable elders.

6) All participants could take designed flowers back home for free and give to their

grandparents as special gift occasion

7) This competition is run by Interflora British Unit.

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1.2 Events marketing

Objective: To create engagement, experience and positive attitude towards Interflora (Flora

Design Competition)

Time frame: 2 October 2016

Place: Hampton court palace garden, London

Events marketing have positive impact on brand equity through shaping the attitude

and experience towards brand (Zarantonello, and Schmitt, 2013). In this events, every

participants would get free Interflora pen and event’ agenda (Figure 1) at the entrance of

event space. The pen is selected as survivor because most of people have to use pen in their

daily life thus it would increase customer ability to recall brand. The pen would design in

black color with gold Interflora logo. Moreover, it should has particular boots such sales

food, drink, gift shop (sell pen, notebook, flower, keychain, shirt, cap with Interflora logo),

and flower shop around the event space (Figure 2). All boots would have sets of Interflora’s

brochure which contain information about their history and unique selling point. In addition,

all staffs in the events should wear black Interflora T-shirt, cap and jeans to represent young

and active looks as well as promote Interflora brand.

Figure 1: Event Agenda

Front Back

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*note at the end of Agenda: Candle making tutorial is the activities that add value to flowers

(reuse old flowers in more beneficial way) .It could be a new leisure activities for elders. As a

result, young adults might perceived that flower are the perfect gift for Grandparents’ Day.

Figure 2. Design and layout of event space

1.3 Sale promotion “gift for grandparents”

Objective: To increase sales on grandparents’ day

Time frame: 29 September – 3 October, 2016

Sales promotion has positive effect on purchasing intention (Santini, et al., 2015).

Monetary promotion is more suitable for products that carry utilitarian value while non-

monetary promotions are more appropriate for products with hedonic value (Santini, et al.,

2015). Interflora product contain hedonic value, however, it could combine both monetary

(discount) and non-monetary (limited edition) to encourage greatest sales effects. Interflora

could design a special grandparent boutiques during 29 September to 3 October and sell at 20

percent discount price to stimulate young adult’s willingness to buy flowers for their

grandparents.

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1.4 Public relation (CSR)

Objective: To increase to create positive attitude and goodwill of the brand.

Timeframe: after Grandparents’ Day

Public relation is the significant tools to raise brand credibility (Mikáčová and

Gavlaková, 2014). In this campaign, Interflora could upload pictures and VDO clip of events

in e-media such as Facebook, twitter, and website which represent the happiness of

grandparents and young adults when doing activities together. Moreover, donate 5 percent of

profit to disable elder as another corporate social responsibility (CSR). In addition, company

could give publicity about important of grandparent’s day as another day for big family

reunited and create happiness for elder.

Part III: Campaign’s communication evaluation

After finished conducting IMC plan, it is necessary to set plans for evaluation before,

during, and after the campaign. According to Pickton and Broderick (2005), there are five

benefits in evaluating the campaign including improved decision making, risk reduction,

improved campaign, cost saving, and accumulated wisdom. Interflora should select and

combine the right media class which reflect highest effectiveness. As higher a brand’s

effectiveness of IMC could lead to higher market shares (Lee and Park, 2007).

3.1) Pre-testing: evaluation of marketing communication before start the campaign in order

to reduce risk of failure and resource wasting (Pickton and Broderick, 2005).

Focus group interview could be used before launch the actual marketing campaign.

First, recruit tens experts in the IMC field to seek their comments, critiques, and suggestions

about two IMC campaigns which mentioned above. At these stage, the brand could get

suggestion from the experts about which IMC media class are more or less effective based on

their experience. Second, testing the effect of pre-launching adverts with tens young adults by

conducting hall test.

Focus group (with experts)

- Recruit 10 experts in the IMC field which specialized in advertising, event marketing,

and digital marketing.

- Ask them the general ideas about class that Interflora plan to use.

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- Ask them which channel of media vehicles (for television) that they have used gain

the most effective result.

- How many time and what period which their ads on air and get highest response. This

is for setting the schedule of TV ads.

- Discuss the content of message in TV ads, posters, and internet before conducting hall

test with young adults.

Hall test (with young adults) :

- Recruits 20 young adults from shopping street to viewing room

- Let them see the ads then record their facial expression when they see the video ads

(Flora design competition) in order to measure emotional impacts.

- Do they missing their grandparents after they see the ads?

- Does ads has impact on their intention to attend the events?

- Let them see the content of posters and discuss whether the content message and

design could capture their attention.

- Let them see the agenda and ask them “If you are the participants, do you think the

time frame and activities are appropriate” (Flora design competition).

- Ask them whether the prize impact their willingness to participate the events.

Overall, pre-testing marketing communication allow Interflora to improve their

message content and incentives to participating events before launch the actual campaign.

Therefore, it would increase the confidence that IMC campaigns have high potential to

become successful.

3.2) Post-testing: This stage would determine whether campaign able achieve objective, at

least cost, without distorting the original message (Pickton and Broderick, 2005).

1) Achieve all of these objectives

• Increase young adults awareness of grandparents’ day compare with last year. This

could be evaluated by monitoring social media on grandparent’s day and how people post

the picture of themselves and grandparents compare with last year.

• Interflora’s sales on Grandparents’ Day should increase by 20 percent from last year

as state in the objective.

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• 70 percent of young adult and grandparents who receive wow experience from

Interflora during grandparents’ day, spread the positive word of mouth through offline

and online channel. These could be measure by distributing short questionnaire at the end

of events which ask participants whether they like this events and will they tell others

about this events.

• To obtain at least 2000 new visitors from digital media such as official website,

Facebook, and Twitter after Grandparents’ day.

2) Cost-effectiveness

Besides evaluating campaign trough objectives, Interflora should also consider the

cost and return on Investment (ROI). The profit which they get after campaign should be at

least 20 percent more than their investment on advertising and events.

Part V: Conclusion

In the recent year, there is increase in competition among flower delivery industry

especially on Christmas, Valentine’s, and Mother’s Day. However, not many UK people give

any gift to their grandparents on the Grandparents’ Day although it was introduced to the UK

since 1990. Interflora see Grandparents’ Day as another opportunities for flower gifting

occasion but first they need to increase awareness of Grandparents’ Day to young adults.

Therefore, this papers suggest creative strategy for Interflora as purpose to increase

awareness of Grandparents’ Day to young adults. First, promoting the ads of grandparents’

Day by using TV advertising, Transported- billboard, poster, and e-media. Second, creating

flora design competition events to enhance family relationship between young adults and

their grandparents. Third, using sales promotion to stimulate sales. Finally, creating company

goodwill and positive attitude by uploading the event’s VDO clip in e-media such as

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Website together with donate 5 percent of event’s profit to

disable elders. Overall, this Grandparents’ Day campaign integrate three communication mix

including advertising, events, sale promotions and public relation (CSR). At the end, the

result of campaign should be achieving objective with in the budget and get at least 20

percent return on investment.

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