Introduction
Subway Food is a leading fast food chain attracting thousands of visitors daily. Subway Food specializes in sandwiches and salads, proposes fresh and healthy food. For Subway Food, effective market communication requires an integrated promotional system that reaches from primary producer to ultimate consumer. Communications flow to markets through long, complex channels that include manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, consumers, agencies, and media. Marketing communications serve four basic management purposes. First, they bridge information gaps existing among the restaurant and customers. Second, they help coordinate the promotional activities of the total marketing system to achieve a coordinated thrust. Third, they help adjust the system to customer and consumer requirements. Fourth, they adjust and help in adjusting the product to customer needs. Subway Food target market is diverse including different age and social groups. The main groups of consumers involve low and middle class families living in urban areas, busy professionals and students. Current advertising slogan of the company is “Eat Fresh”. This slogan reflects philosophy and unique corporate vision of the company (Subway Food Home Page 2008).
Media Outlets
Broadcast media
Subway Food uses broadcast media to attract new visitors and inform about new changes in menus and new services proposed to customers. This media best suits for low class and middle consumers who spend many hours watching TV (on weekends). Broadcast media involves television commercials. Actually, advertising messages appear to go to these groups of consumers whether or not they want them. Before the recipient of an advertising message receives the message, he does not even know what information, if any, the message will contain (Clow and Baack 2005). However, this is not a problem peculiar to advertising messages or information generally coming from broadcast media. It must be granted that it is often the case that a buyer obtains a commodity of unknown value in advance and, nevertheless, the buyer can decide how much he is willing to pay for it. This means that to the receivers of the advertising message, the messages are a bad for which they must be paid as an inducement to receive the messages. Broadcast media does not reach busy professionals and students who do not spend many hours before TV (Chitty et al 2005).
Print media
Subway Food advertises in national and international newspapers and magazines in order to popularize its brand and remind consumers about new prices and services (Clow and Baack 2005). This media channel appeals and reaches low and middle families and busy professionals. The uniqueness and importance of this media for Subway Foods is that the sender of the advertising message, who can be regarded as the seller, does not know in advance what he will receive in exchange for giving the message to the recipient. The advertising message is costly to the sender and he does not wish to waste his resources. He does not wish to convey messages to people who will find them of no value (Chitty et al 2005). Therefore, Subway Foods has an incentive to convey messages where they will benefit him the most by their effect on the recipients. Other things equal, the advertiser would like to send his messages to precisely those people who act as if they most value the messages (Subway Food Home Page 2008).
Support Media
Outdoor advertising is used in European countries in order to attract attention of new visitors and remind loyal customers about the brand and its advantages. There is another implication of this argument. This media is effective and usable for all target markets as it is noticed and seen by all social classes. The main limitation of outdoor advertising and billboards is low response rate. It is not targeted at a particular target audience or customer group (Clow and Baack 2005).For those with a relatively large stock of knowledge about the product, the additional benefit of the advertising message is slight. The benefit is largest for those with the smallest stock of knowledge about the product initially. Therefore, the seller of the product has some incentive to offer it to the steady customers or to the repeat buyers at a lower price than to the newer buyers. This may explain why some more heavily advertised products give customers a lower price for the second purchase than for the first. The coupon enclosed in a package and the premiums given to those who collect a number of labels are examples (Chitty et al 2005).
Direct Marketing
For Subway Foods, the Internet and online community became one of the most important media channels popular among young consumers. This media channel is an ideal one for busy professional and students. Often the Internet is used in a complementary manner, with advertising paving the way for personal-selling activities. In other situations, such as in making selling is usually the most important component, while advertising may be a supplementary activity that helps create awareness. In either case, both should be coordinated by marketing managers. This media is suitable for all groups and international target audiences (Clow and Baack 2005).
Advertising and Target Market
Advertising actually expands the overall market. The value of a customer’s time and search costs is similar from the seller’s point of view to buyers’ valuations of product attributes (Chitty et al 2005). Hence some sellers should cater to high search-cost customers by advertising and establishing reputations that effectively lower these costs. Sellers searching out customers by advertising and reputation are substitutes for buyers’ search and shopping activities (Subway Food Home Page 2008).
The Internet
The Internet is selected by Subway Food as the most popular media channels attracting young target audiences and busy professionals. This channel allows Subway Food to update information and promote its brand and services. This channel supports other media choices and helps consumers find information about the company and its products, stores location and menus. Where objective information is scarce, expensive, or conflicting, consumers must attempt to make up their own minds using whatever information is available. When information comes from a suspect source advertising consumers require such information to be more persuasive than that supplied by an objective source, but they do not ignore it (Chitty et al 2005).
Interactive Media
Interactive media helps Subway Food analyze the difference between each consumer’s preferences and market availabilities. If individual consumers exhibit little dispersion in their preferences and search costs, the gross value of advertising product characteristics is small and its net social value may be even negative, for the same reason it was in some of the examples in the section above on advertising and perceptions. Since advance knowledge of attributes allows customers to specialize search activities in the most preferred varieties, the value of catering to particular groups is correspondingly greater when there is greater dispersion in tastes among buyers. This media appeals to all target markets and help the fast food to evaluate their preferences and tastes, purchasing decisions and frequency of purchase. On the basis of this prior distribution the consumer decides whether to purchase the product. After purchase he must take the experience into account and modify whatever opinions he had before (Clow and Baack 2005).
International Press
This media channel is aimed to attract international consumers and create a unique image of the Subway brand and its services. Experience-good advertising provides only indirect information, namely, the fact that the brand is advertised and to what extent. This information is valuable to consumers because heavily advertised brands are likely to be better buys (Subway Food Home Page 2008). Consumer control over the accuracy of advertising is much weaker for experience-good advertising, because for experience goods it is cheaper to learn about brand quality by buying and trying the brand rather than by search before purchase. Subway Food advertises in the Times and the Look. Target market involves busy professionals from all over the world and all social classes from European countries (Clow and Baack 2005).
In sum, selection of advertising channels and media is a result of market analysis and target audience’s preferences. Consumers still exert substantial control over the accuracy of experience-good ads through their unwillingness to repurchase brands from a firm that has deceived them. Alternative sources of information about brand qualities become available, although, because of the public good aspect of information, they may provide less than the optimal amount of information.
References
Chitty, B., Barrker, N., & Shimp, T. (2005). Integrated Marketing Communication – First Pacific Rim Edition. South Melbourne: Thomson Learning.
Clow, K.E. and Baack, D. (2002). Integrated Advertising, Promotion and Marketing Communications, Prentice Hall/Pearson Education: Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Subway Food Home Page (2008). Web.