Background of the study

Communication mix is the marketers’ bag of tools for Marketing communicating with customers and other stakeholders. All of these many tools must be carefully blended under the concept of integrated marketing communication in other to deliver a clear and compelling message (Arenset al., 2008)

The purpose of marketing communication is not to recover to cost be to capture the value of the product in the sub-conscious minds of the customers. Marketing communications according to Kolter and Armstrong (2010) is the specific blend of promotional tools that the company uses persuasively to communicate customer value and build customer relationship. Promotion is a means of communicating a product or service to the buyer or final consumer. It should be recalled that each of the marketing communication mix means proper integration of the marketing mix variable and the promotional mix in the right proportion to achieve the market goals of the organization. In other word, Keith (2010) says that promotion as a communication tools is the process of establishing commonness or ones of thought between the seller and the buyer. The brighter understanding and the knowledge of the product helps to keep moving the product forward.

Effective promotion pushes the products along different stages of response depending on the stages of the product on the product life cycle particular response demanded by the marketers. The response could be awareness, liking knowledge, preference, conviction and or purchase.

It is also said that a company can the best quality product which price is considered reasonable, but without letting people to known that such product exist, and can be found at a particular place, such product cannot get market patronage because it is suffering from major marketing problem which is lack of marketing communication/ promotion. 

The marketing communication mixes are the follows:

• Advertising

• Sales promotion

• Personal selling

• Public relation and 

• Direct marketing

Advertising is an paid form of non-personal presentation and the promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor. It involves the use of mass medium such as Radio, television, newspaper (Kolter and Armstrong, 2010). Additionally, there are several reasons for growing importance of marketing communications. These include: a change of marketing expenditures from media advertising to other form of communication, particularly consumers and trade oriented sales promotion, a movement away from relying on advertising focus on approaches which emphasized mass media to low-cost, more targeted communication tools such as event marketing sponsorship, direct mail, sales promotion and the internet. There are also shift in the market from manufacturers to retailers, and the rapid growth and development of data-base-marketing; demands for greater accountability for advertising agencies and changes in the way agencies are compensated; the rapid growth of internet, which changing the nature of how companies do business and the ways they communicate and interact with consumers. There have been increased efforts to measure and improves marketing communications return on investment (ROI) by clients and agencies (Belch and Belch, 2014) (Corbelissen, 2001; 7-15; Shiva, 2003). These factors have given rise to investigations into new ways of managing marketing communications.