Analyze an organization’s media communication activities Essay

The objective of this project is to analyze an organization’s media communication activities. The work must use concepts, models, and theories to support and critical the company’s website. It should be critically assess + evaluate and use strategy to analyze. The author should review it as a marketing professional specialist and knows how, when, and where the organization use digital media to communicate with its audience, customer, stakeholder, and public. Executive Summary: P&O Cruises uses a maturity website to distribute and communicate (Fill, 2002). It is a fabulous website that uses a lot of tools from personal communications (PCs) to support their offline marketing (Hartley, 1999). Once customers surf its website, they could get information they need easily. The website becomes a distributed channel for the business. It is in the highest level of scenario 4 (Doren, 2000). Information on website is variety and useful that helps offline media and lures more customers to join the P&O Cruises with rational exchange (Fill, 2002). P&O Cruises – Background P&O Cruises is one of the cruises belonging to Carnival Corporation & PLC. There are 13 distinct brands of cruises all over the world are operating by Carnival Corporation & PLC; P&O is one of them. P&O is not as same as its name belongs to the P&O group (Peninsula and Oriental steam Navigation Company); for it was demerged into Carnival public limited company on 23 October 2000, and has changed its name to Carnival Public limited company on 17 April 2003. P&O Cruises now is the largest premium cruise brand in the United Kingdom. See the list as below. Carnival Corporation Princess Cruises & Carnival plc P&O Cruises were belong to Ocean Village P&O Princess. Swan Hellenic Cruises plc AIDA P&O Cruises Australia Carnival Cruise Lines Holland America Line Windstar Cruises Seabourn Cruise Line Costa Cruises Cunard Line A’ROSA Main Report: Marketing mix†¦ Product P&O Cruises currently owns four types of ships – Aurora, Oriana, Oceana and Adonia. Each of them gives different atmosphere and personality to customers. They are service, facility and quality oriented. Mostly, customers who are attracted to join P&O Cruises are through travel agencies to get tickets no matter a set of schedule or connections with flights or another cruise. If customers who are interested in P&O Cruises, P&O Cruises also use different brochures to introduce its â€Å"products† to them. P&O Cruises builds a marvelous introduction of its products on the website. There is a column of their ships in directories of its website introducing each of ships’ details by clicking any icon of them (Chaffey, 2000). There are also other links connecting to these four ships that makes customers easily check to P&O Cruises’ ships (main products) whenever they want. The website builds a good cognitive environment to customers who are like ship, boat, cruise, and adventure. Most fantastically, customers could find what each deck looks like by 360i panoramic tour. After customers â€Å"learn† about these ships, they enable to feel more about these ships by â€Å"fun stuff† sector, which involved games, videos, and pictures (screensaver and wallpapers) to addict customers affective (Fill, 2002). Promotion P&O Cruises is not a company which uses all of the marketing communication tools to communicate with its target audience, but it uses its promotion tools well to achieve its customer needs and to explore its market opportunities (Chaffey, 2000). 5 main elements of the promotional or communications mix of P&O Cruises are analyzed as below (Fill, 2002): 1. Advertising (Off-line) P&O Cruises has TV advertising displaying during summer time or the beginning of the year. Customers who haven’t seen the advertisement on TV could also enjoy the advertisement on P&O Cruises’ website; to the â€Å"Fun Stuff-Videos† to view the version of its â€Å"Sh-boom† advertisement. It’s an advertisement with affective (Fill, 2002). Besides TV advertising, P&O Cruises posts its advertising on newspaper as well. (On-line). There are many agencies selling P&O Cruises’ tickets on line; they help P&O Cruises build a perfect advertisement system. If someone who is interested in cruises, they will easily find out the name of P&O Cruises on many websites building by travel agencies. Customers are able to easily book a cruise through any ABTA travel agent; there are about 16 agent’s linking to P&O Cruises and helping customers to book tickets in different areas. Although many websites all connecting to the name of P&O Cruises, it is difficult for people who want to buy the ticket right through P&O Cruises’ website. 2. Sales promotion (Off-line) (On-line) P&O Cruises’ is targeted. It divides into consumers and the sales forces of both P&O Cruises’ and its agents (Fill, 2002). The sales promotion P&O Cruises uses is by the timing when customer book for their tickets. The earlier they book for cruises, the more discount they will have. It uses the method of price reductions to motive its sales in the early stage (Fill, 2002). P&O Cruises also sets up the Portunus Club for customers who re-join to the P&O Cruises. There are Ruby, Sapphire, and Gold tiers for different types of customers. Customers could get points for their discounts when they had joined the cruises and also discounts to any other consumption on the ship. The method builds customer royalty; it is referred to as a ‘points accrual programme’ that helps the company keep customers loyalty for preventing them from moving to P&O Cruises’ competitor (Fill, 2002). The Portunus Club has not only increased the amount of customers, but also maintained those current customers well (Raaij, 1998). 3. personal selling (Off-line) P&O Cruises’ tickets are sold through personal selling or other travel agencies. Customers buying tickets can either from agencies or directly make a phone call to the P&O Cruises as the telemarketing. It is a good method for the company itself uses lots of personal selling on promotes their ticket, for it is a method always interactive to customer and company. And â€Å"Consumers may talk to and obtain answers from ‘real’ persons or from machine interaction† that helps P&O Cruises directly being aware of what customers wants and what they need (Raaij, 1998). (On-line) On the website, customers who are interested in any trip and willing to join the tour could book on line by leaving the messages to the reservation team. Besides, it’s very easy for customers to find the ticket selling on website from different agencies in different areas, and then buy the ticket based on customer needs. 4. public relations (Off-line) The means of PR of P&O Cruises is announcing news on newspapers. It mostly tells people about its schedules, timetables and its new ship or company information on travel pages or events column. P&O Cruises owns a press center to run for its news. (On-line) Customers could also find out their news through news websites, travel agents or the websites connect to sailings, such as, â€Å"what you need to about† or â€Å"scoop agents† (two website names). Moreover, there are numbers of news P&O Cruises showed to the public and listed on its own website. It is â€Å"press centre† in â€Å"the company† section. For people who are interested in to P&O Cruises and want to know more about its reputation, besides company introduction, they could attain more information on this section. 5. direct marketing (Off-line) (On-line) P&O Cruises uses direct marketing through ABTA agents and many other travel agencies where they sell cruises’ tickets. It connects to personal selling to use different types of tools to achieve the needs of customers. It uses e-mail (member confirm) and through post-mail (brochure sending) to directly send the information to customers.   Place P&O Cruises, the Britain’s leading cruise operator, customer aboard its shipping at Southampton, UK or fly on a scheduled or P&O Cruises’ charter flight to any of its 25 destinations all over the world. All ships cruise Europe in the summer, and in winter Aurora and Adonia embark on round the world cruises while Oceana and Oriana tour the Caribbean. Places are stabile in different places by annual schedules; depended on where customers plan to go abroad. The headquarters is in Southampton, but usually people usually book tickets at agencies instead of heading for P&O Cruises’ office. If people who would like to book tickets online, they could go to www. pocruises. com or through links on any ABTA agents to buy tickets. Agents are viewed as the P&O Cruises’ retailers. This method helps P&O Cruises reach its sale targets by selling tickets to many other segments in different areas and places. The channel of its distribution is producer –> retailers–> consumers (Blythe, 1998). Price P&O Cruises sets its price at the moment when customers buy tickets. The company uses different brochures to attract customer to join its cruises business. Customers could save as much as money if they book earlier according to the timetable set up by P&O Cruises. Customers could save up to 5%~45% discounts for early booking, depending on availability, and its reward for those who book early. P&O Cruises named it as â€Å"pricebreakers†. Besides, price differs from different cabin type and grade that customers choose. It is very easy for customers to find the price on the website or by the brochure which customers could also easily get by request online. * DRIP – P&O Cruises (model by Fill, 2002). P&O Cruises’ communications have need to: â€Å"Differentiates† itself by it is one of the oldest cruises company which form of British to attract customers who enjoy in English style. â€Å"Remind and reassure† its customers by telling them that the leisure cruising business was started by P&O in 1844. The step helps the company acquire trust from customers Oldest = standard = traditional (British) ? â€Å"Inform† the consumers by educating them that P&O Cruises is the company with offering high quality but middle-low price to customers â€Å"Persuade† to the consumers that althouthg P&O Cruises is the oldest company, it has most modern fleet of ships in the UK. Scenarios In order to know how a company created a website on line to present its own products through the internet, the company needs to define the level of commitment it wants to reach (Doren, 2000). There are 4 possible scenarios for promoting on the internet. P&O Cruises is belonging to the highest level 4, because it offers on-line ordering of products and services. The product P&O Cruises supplies to customer is not the tangible things that customers could touch but services and facilities on cruises. So the company tries to present its product through the website. P&O Cruises uses web cam, lots of 360i panoramic tour and many of pictures on its website to interact with users. Moreover, there are images, screensavers and wallpapers of its 4 ships for customers to download. The usages of multimedia presentations also reach facilitation as a web promotion; it enables a more personal, one-on-one approach with the internet user (Doren, 2000). According to the four possible scenarios lists, P&O Cruises does make a high extensive interaction with its customers through its website. The web site of P&O Cruises may be high costs, but it could attract more customers order on line.