Thursday, February 18, 2010

Communications Management

Communications Management, as the name suggests is a course in Management. Post liberalization (1991), the markets are flooded with several categories of products and several products with similar properties. Like so many toothpastes and soaps and detergents...

Hence the industry needs more than product and marketing managers because now they need to sell 'brands', not products. Brand is more than a logo or packaging or name. So you need people who can create association in the minds of consumers about that specific product. For example, even though both Colgate and Close-up are toothpastes, you buy close-up because you need 'total protection', I buy close-up because I believe it gives me 'confidence to come closer'. 

So we have 'BRAND MANAGEMENT' No one can create brands without understand consumers without proper 'Marketing Research'. And hence at MICA besides Brand Management you learn Marketing Research.

Once you have understood the consumers and created a brand, you need to communicate that to the TARGET consumers and so comes in picture 'ACCOUNT PLANNING' function of Ad agency where the agency person works in close association with brand team and creative team and helps create appropriate communication.

Having done that, they now need to know where their TARGET audience is and choose appropriate media to communicate their message. That is Media Planning, buying and strategies. You can understand how difficult this would be with more than 200 TV channels, so many newspapers, Magazines, outdoors, events, radio etc...so this is an equally critical component of managing business.

Supporting the above four functions are foundation courses in management like marketing, finance, accounts, Quantitative Techniques, Organization Behavior etc. Then there are communication courses like 
Theories of mass communication and mass media,
consumer behavior, 
language, 
culture and communication, 
semiotics, 
metaphors and
narratives etc...

You also have courses in Urban and Rural Retail and marketing, social and development communication, business ethics and strategic management. I hope this clarifies what do you learn at MICA.

Where do MICAns work and in what kind of profiles??

OK...as you see, there is no business that does not need 'communication'.Even cable companies like Finolex are in to 'brand building' and need to communicate with customers who never knew what cables did to their lives...So opportunities are plenty.

MICANs are in to 'managing communications' in several businesses and if you see the list of companies where MICAns work, you will find that.

2 comments:

  1. This post is an excerpt from Deval mam's post in pagalguy.

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  2. An illuminating article on the various fields of study at MICA. Great job, Shiva!

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