Global Marketing Communications

Advertising and public relations, sales promotion, personal selling, direct marketing,

and a quick-reference glossary. COMPANION TO THE WEEK 5 DISCUSSION, JOURNAL, AND ASSIGNMENT GUIDES | PREPARED AS A SELF-

Contained Study Resource

Week 5 of BUS 622 is titled Global Marketing Communications. It is the week the course turns to the fourth element of the marketing mix — promotion — and to the discipline that holds the promotion mix together: integrated marketing communications, or IMC. Where Week 4 examined product and price, Week 5 examines how a firm tells the market about that product: through advertising, public relations, sales promotion, personal selling, direct marketing, and the fastmoving channels of digital, social, and mobile marketing. The week’s framing premise, stated in the course introduction, is that the digital revolution has created a global electronic marketplace whose momentum is not slowing — so the promotion decision is now inseparable from the digital one. The week carries four graded deliverables. Two are discussion forums, due in their first-post form on Day 3; one is a reflective journal; and one is a formal written assignment. The journal and the assignment are both due on Day 7. The table below is the map of the week; each row has a dedicated companion guide that takes the task apart in full.

Discussion Forum 2 Initial post Day 3 Mobile Advertising and Mobile Commerce (Thursday); replies due Day 7 (Monday). Journal Due Day 7 (Monday); Personal Branding Activity Part 2 submitted through Waypoint. Assignment Due Day 7 (Monday); Integrated Marketing Communications submitted through Waypoint.

week, not on Day 6. Each of the four deliverables has its own companion guide; this document is the map that connects them.

Canvas lists three Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs) for Week 5. They are reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually asks you to be able to do. Every graded task is tagged to one or more of these outcomes, so the WLOs are the rubric behind the rubric.

Evaluate aspects of promotion, such as sales promotion, personal selling, and direct marketing, as important parts of the global marketing communications decisions. — A Chapter 14 outcome. It widens the promotion mix beyond advertising to the support tools, and again asks for evaluation rather than description. The Promotion discussion’s directives on sales promotion and on personal selling versus direct marketing live here. Discuss how the digital revolution has impacted the world of global marketing. — A Chapter 15 outcome. It covers digital, social, and mobile marketing and e-commerce. The Mobile Advertising and Mobile Commerce discussion is tagged here, and the journal’s search-engine-optimization theme draws on the same chapter. One pattern is worth naming. Two of the three outcomes use the verb evaluate, and the third uses discuss. None says “define” or “list.” Week 5 is graded on judgment: on your ability to weigh a communication choice, explain why it works or fails, and recommend a better one. A submission that only describes the promotion mix has answered a question the week did not ask.

The course text is Green, M. C., & Keegan, W. J. (2020). Global marketing (10th ed.). Pearson, available through the VitalSource platform. Week 5 assigns three new chapters and revisits one from earlier in the course.

Global Marketing Communications Decisions II: Sales Promotion, Personal Selling, and Chapter 14 Special Forms of Marketing Communication. Covers sales promotion, personal selling, direct marketing, support media, sponsorship, and product placement — the rest of the promotion mix. Global Marketing and the Digital Revolution. Covers the innovations and trends behind Chapter 15 digital, social, mobile, and e-commerce marketing; anchors the Mobile discussion and the IMC assignment. Global Market-Entry Strategies: Licensing, Investment, and Strategic Alliances. Revisited Chapter 9 so that the Mobile discussion can evaluate how the entry mode — licensing versus investment — shapes a mobile strategy. The Resources page also assigns four articles and one faculty video. The articles are reading by deliverable: the Toyota crisis case study and the Penn corporate-crisis article support the Promotion discussion; the Cialdini persuasion article and the Puntoni LLM-search article support the Personal Branding journal. The video, “BUS622 Week Five,” supports the IMC assignment.

Penn, M. (2023, December 12). Corporate crises — and reputational recovery — Corporate crises have changed. Harvard Business Review. Behind the UAGC Library’s Business Source Elite database. Supports the Promotion discussion. Puntoni, S., Ensing, M., & Bowers, J. (2024, May 24). How marketers can adapt to LLM-powered search LLM-powered search. Harvard Business Review. Behind Business Source Elite. Supports the Personal Branding journal. Stettner, M. (2024, August 15). Robert Cialdini goes undercover to learn the secrets Cialdini on persuasion of persuasion. Investor’s Business Daily. Behind EBSCOHost. Supports the Personal Branding journal. The University of Arizona Global Campus. (2019, January 11). BUS622 week five Faculty video [Video]. Kaltura. Walks through the promotional portion of a marketing plan; supports the IMC assignment. Has closed captioning and a downloadable transcript.

the volume or page details. Where a guide in this set describes one of these articles, it uses only the description Canvas itself provides — treat the substance as something to verify against the article once you have read it.

Chapter 13 opens the promotion half of the marketing mix. The umbrella idea is integrated marketing communications (IMC): the recognition that a firm’s advertising, sales promotion, public relations, personal selling, and direct marketing are not separate departments firing separate messages, but elements of one communication strategy that must be deliberately coordinated so that the brand tells a single, consistent story. Every channel should reinforce the others. Advertising in the Global Arena Advertising is any sponsored, paid message placed in a mass medium. The central global question is the same standardization-versus-adaptation tension the course has tracked since Chapter 4: should a campaign run with one creative idea worldwide (global advertising), or be tailored market by market? The realistic answer is usually a middle path — a consistent global strategy and brand idea, with execution adapted for language, culture, regulation, and media availability. Chapter 13 also surveys the advertising industry: the largest global advertisers and the major agency holding companies, and the agency-selection question of whether to use one global agency or local agencies. The Week 5 Overview infographic, “Factors to Consider While Selecting a Marketing Agency,” lists five such factors — company organization, national responsiveness, area coverage, buyer perception, and digital expertise. The Creative Process and Media Decisions Two further decisions sit inside advertising. The creative decision is the message: the big idea, the appeal, and the execution. The media decision is the placement: which vehicles — television, print, digital, outdoor, social, mobile — reach the target audience efficiently, given that media availability, cost, and audience habits differ sharply across countries. Public Relations — and Crisis Communication Public relations is the element of the promotion mix that builds relationships rather than buying messages. The Promotion discussion quotes the textbook’s definition directly: PR “is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics” (Green & Keegan, 2020, p. 431). PR works through earned media, press relations, and corporate communication, and its hardest test is the crisis — the moment when a firm must communicate fast, honestly, and consistently while under scrutiny. The week’s Toyota and Penn readings are both crisis-communication cases, and the lesson they share is that the cost of a slow, defensive, or inconsistent response is measured in lost trust.

Chapter 14 covers the rest of the promotion mix — the tools that work alongside advertising and PR. Each does a different communication job. Sales Promotion Sales promotion is any paid, short-term incentive designed to stimulate trial or purchase: coupons, samples, rebates, premiums, contests, and trade allowances. Consumer sales promotion targets the end buyer; trade sales promotion targets the channel. Its strength is speed — it moves volume now. Globally, it is one of the hardest tools to standardize, because the legality of a coupon, a sweepstake, or a price discount varies sharply by country, as do retail structures and consumer attitudes toward incentives. A promotion that is routine in one market may be restricted or banned in another. Personal Selling Personal selling is a person-to-person communication between a representative and a prospective buyer. It is the most expensive contact per customer but also the most adaptive: a salesperson reads the buyer in real time, answers objections, and closes. The chapter frames personal selling as a process — prospecting, the approach, the presentation, handling objections, the close, and follow-up — and notes that the role of culture in negotiation and relationship-building makes the global sales task distinct from the domestic one. Direct Marketing and the Special Forms Direct marketing is communication that reaches targeted individuals directly — by mail, email, catalog, telephone, or addressable digital channels — and that seeks a measurable, direct response without a retail intermediary. The key contrast for Week 5: personal selling is interpersonal and two-way; direct marketing is mediated and built for measurable response at scale. Chapter 14 also covers the special forms of marketing communication — support media and out-of-home advertising, sponsorship, and product placement — the tools that surface in the IMC assignment’s Part 2, where you analyze a promotional activity other than advertising.

Chapter 15 covers the digital revolution: the innovations and trends — broadband, mobile, cloud, social platforms, data analytics, and now AI-driven search — that have reshaped how marketing reaches and transacts with customers. For Week 5, three ideas matter most. Digital, Social, and Mobile Marketing Digital marketing uses electronic channels — web, search, email, display — to reach customers. Social-media marketing adds the dimension of conversation: customers create and share content, so the firm influences rather than fully controls the message. Mobile marketing uses the smartphone as the channel, and it carries two capabilities a desktop does not: location, through GPS, and payment, through the phone’s wallet. Those two capabilities are precisely what the Mobile discussion asks you to build a strategy around. Mobile Advertising and Mobile Commerce Mobile advertising delivers messages to the phone; mobile commerce (m-commerce) conducts the transaction on it. Together they let a brand reach a customer who is in a specific place at a specific moment and let that customer buy without friction. Search-engine optimization (SEO) — structuring content so it surfaces for the right queries — belongs to the same chapter, and it is the concept the Personal Branding journal applies to a LinkedIn profile. Why Chapter 9 Returns Week 5 revisits Chapter 9 — market-entry strategies — for one specific reason. The Mobile discussion asks you to evaluate how entering a new market by licensing versus by investment would change the mobile strategy you propose. Licensing transfers a brand or system to a local partner for a fee, with low control and low risk; investment (a wholly owned subsidiary or acquisition) gives full control at high cost and risk. A mobile strategy built on a unified app, a single payment system, and consistent customer data is far easier to execute under a controlled investment entry than under a licensing arrangement where the local licensee owns the customer relationship. That is the analytical link the discussion rewards.

Each deliverable below has a dedicated companion guide that restates the prompt as a checklist, decodes the rubric, and supplies a model. This section is the overview; use it to plan the week, then work from the individual guides. Discussion 1 — Promotion (3 points) Tagged to WLOs 1 and 2. A 250-word initial post with three directives: determine four major difficulties that compromise communication with customers anywhere and give examples; explain the issues that arise when a global sales promotion strategy meets different countries; and differentiate personal selling from direct marketing. Built on Chapter 13 and the Toyota and Penn crisis readings. Two peer replies of 100+ words. See the Week 5 Discussion 1 Study Guide. Discussion 2 — Mobile Advertising and Mobile Commerce (3 points) Tagged to WLO 3. Choose Starbucks or McDonald’s and act as its contracted mobile strategist. A 250-word initial post with four directives: summarize the company’s current mobile activities; formulate a new mobile strategy built on GPS and mobile payment; select two global rollout challenges; and evaluate how a licensing-versus-investment entry mode would affect the strategy. Built on Chapters 15 and 9. Two peer replies of 100+ words, to peers who chose the other company. See the Week 5 Discussion 2 Study Guide. Journal — Personal Branding Activity Part 2 (3 points) Tagged to WLO 2. The continuation of the Week 3 Personal Branding journal. Enhance the LinkedIn profile created in Part 1 by applying the “pre-suasion” idea and SEO keywords and by folding in instructor feedback; describe the changes and how keywords maximize quality views; and post the profile URL. Submitted through Waypoint. See the Week 5 Journal Guide. Assignment — Integrated Marketing Communications (7 points) Tagged to WLOs 1 and 3. A 4–5 page APA paper analyzing an IMC campaign of the Week 2 mentor company. Part 1: identify a campaign, gather four cross-media examples (at least one print, one digital), analyze each ad and the unifying elements. Part 2: identify a non-advertising communication activity, describe it, compare it to the campaign, judge their alignment, and give one strength and one weakness. Submitted through Waypoint; it feeds the Week 6 final paper. See the Week 5 Assignment Guide.

BUS 622 builds the global marketing mix one element at a time. Week 3 covered market study and analysis; Week 4 covered product and price; Week 5 covers promotion; and Week 6 is the summative Global Marketing Plan Part 2, the course’s final paper. Week 5 is the last full content week before that final paper, and it is wired into it more directly than any week before. The connection is explicit. The Integrated Marketing Communications assignment states on its Canvas page that it “will be incorporated into your Week 6 Global Marketing Plan Part 2 final paper,” and it analyzes the same mentor company you chose for the Global Marketing Plan Part 1 in Week 2. The promotion analysis you write this week is therefore not a standalone exercise — it is a section of the final paper drafted a week early. Write it well and the Week 6 paper inherits a finished component; write it thinly and you rebuild it under deadline pressure.

leaves you entering Week 6 with the final paper’s components assembled rather than outstanding.

The key Week 5 terms, defined for use. Carry the vocabulary into every deliverable — precise terms are what move a submission from description to evaluation.

The set of communication tools a firm uses: advertising, sales Promotion mix promotion, public relations, personal selling, and direct marketing. Sponsored, paid, non-personal communication placed in a mass Advertising medium. Advertising that uses a single creative idea or strategy across Global advertising multiple national markets, typically with adapted execution. “A strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial Public relations (PR) relationships between organizations and their publics” (Green & Keegan, 2020, p. 431). The PR discipline of communicating fast, honestly, and Crisis communication consistently while an organization is under public scrutiny. A short-term paid incentive — coupon, sample, rebate, contest, Sales promotion trade allowance — designed to stimulate trial or purchase. Person-to-person, two-way communication between a sales Personal selling representative and a prospective buyer. Communication that reaches targeted individuals directly through Direct marketing a medium and seeks a measurable, direct response without a retail intermediary. A firm’s paid association with an event, team, or property to build Sponsorship brand exposure and affinity. The paid or arranged appearance of a branded product within Product placement entertainment content. Marketing through electronic channels — web, search, email, Digital marketing display, social, mobile. The delivery of advertising messages through cell phones as a Mobile advertising channel. Conducting product and service transactions through cell phones. Mobile commerce (m-commerce) Structuring content and keywords so it ranks higher and surfaces Search engine optimization (SEO) for the intended search queries. A market-entry mode in which a firm grants a local partner the Licensing right to use its brand or system for a fee — low control, low risk. A market-entry mode using a wholly owned subsidiary, joint Investment entry venture, or acquisition — high control, high cost and risk. Companion to the BUS 622 Week 5 Discussion 1, Discussion 2, Journal, and Assignment guides. Prepared as a selfcontained study resource for Week 5. Verify all dates, point values, competencies, and citation details against Canvas and the UAGC Library before submission.