Ch. 16 - Integrated Marketing Communications

In order to really maintain successful market presence, products and services must make effective use of promotional strategies. A good promotional strategy constitutes an optimal combination of advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion. The primary goal of promotional strategy is to give products and services a competitive advantage over the competition.

Vogue Magazine has invested consistently over the years in both advertising and public relations in order to firmly establish and maintain their persistently effective promotional strategy. Through a diverse regimen of advertising that has included newspapers, magazines, direct mail, billboards, transit cards, and more recently web sites and blogs, Vogue has persistently raised customer awareness of its hard copy and on line publications. Most recently, Vogue has been revamping word-of-mouth PR concepts by creating a network of over 1,000 top fashion and beauty experts who closely follow trends in consumer preference and online activity. These insiders operate as a sort of international focus group network that shares valuable thoughts on new collections, Vogue events, and product samples with their own respective audiences and also with other interconnected networks of fashion minded consumers. 

Through continued campaigns to fund, promote, and organize diverse fashion events the world over, not to mention continued activism in supporting young talent and various charity efforts, Vogue’s PR regimen has proven highly valuable in keeping the magazine’s overall reputation at the top end of public opinion. At the heart of Vogue’s PR success lies the culturally open, participatory nature of these programs. Fashion royalty such as top designers and celebrities are often brought together at these events with younger designers, students, and even underprivileged youth aiming at careers in fashion and fashion journalism.

Sales promotion efforts through long term subscription discounts, promotional gift items, and other customer incentives also help garner quick surges in overall sales for Vogue.

These three components of Vogue’s promotional strategy play critically important roles in the magazine’s overarching marketing communication system. By operating as effective tools of mass communication at many levels of the consumer market, advertising, public relations, and sales promotion push through to a vastly diverse array of customer “receivers” who help propel Vogue to consistently high levels of market success, a testament to the continuing flexibility and effective impact of the magazine’s dynamic marketing communication strategies.