Measuring and understanding competitive activity directly supports the development of communication strategy. This, according to IMC practice, requires deriving market segments, calculating appropriate potential indices, creating appropriate message and media strategies, and establishing an ongoing evaluation plan. The market research needed to support this requires the new analytical techniques often discussed in this publication, such as neural networks, perceptual mapping, causal modeling, and the like. They have faced problems of missing and conflicting data when combining files, and, therefore, naturally question whether the IMC concept really has any practical application. Their skepticism is reinforced when confronted with the question of what to say to different demographic or psychographic segments.
Communication engineering is one analytical solution to the message strategy problem.
This involves doing research again to collect perceptual data from the target segments and applying neural network technology to derive the best messages. Again using research, progress is continuously tracked as the message strategy is executed. Most likely, different message and product strategies would apply to different segments, creating a potentially complex array of material. Direct marketers are used to manipulating different offers and forms and testing them, so this complexity should not be a problem. The difficult part for direct marketers is using market research and adopting some of the principles of the general marketer.