Marketing Communication Strategies and Applications in the Nutraceutical Industry in Uae

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Affective strategies, also referred to as emotional strategies, are designed to elicit certain feelings or emotions within customers, which affect the customer's reasoning process and eventually lead to action. Affective strategies seek to enhance the likability of the product and build recall of the appeal through resonance or emotional approaches. Resonance attempts to connect a product to a customer's past experiences in order to establish a strong tie between the product and the customer. Emotional advertising on the other hand attempts to evoke strong desirable feelings such as luxury, power, happiness, reliability and passion, which lead to product recall and choice.

Conative strategies are used to directly result in some type of consumer behavior. One type of conative strategies is action-inducing conative strategies which are designed to cause people to make impulse buys where the cognitive knowledge or the emotional appeal of the product may come after the purchase is done. Another type is promotional support conative ads designed to support other promotional efforts such as coupons, sweepstakes and phone-in promotions. (Clow & Baack, 2010)

According to Clow & Baack (2010), the manner in which the previous strategies present their advertisement appeals is called an executional framework. Clow & Baack identify types of executional frameworks such as animation, slice-of-life, dramatization, testimonial, authoritative, demonstration, fantasy and informative. Furthermore, they identify the sources and spokespersons to be used in the advertisement as a critical decision to be made. According to them, approximately 20% of all advertisements use some type of celebrity spokesperson to endorse their stamp of approval on a product which can enhance the product's brand equity. In addition, CEOs and expert sources such as physicians, lawyers, accountants and financial planners enhance the effectiveness of the advertisement because they provide backing for testimonials, serve as authoritative figures, demonstrate products and enhance the credibility of the informative side of the advertisement (Clow & Baack, 2010).

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Application of Promotional strategies in Nutraceutical Dr. Nutrition Centre, UAE

Parallel to the raise of health –conscious consumers there is a similar increase in demand for nutritious food supplements and dietary plans. The nutritional supplement market has grown considerably during the last ten years and indicates no signs of slackening. Founded in 2001, Dr. Nutrition Centre is one of the leading dietitians in the UAE which offer different nutrition products and services. Although Dr. Nutrition is commonly known as a provider for customized diet plans and food supplements; however, it has a wide range of products and services including weight loss and gain, diet food and diabetes, slimming devices, skin whitening, hair and skin care, sports nutrition, vitamins and supplements and medical devices. (Products: Dr. Nutrition (DNP) Web site, 2013)

By analyzing the type of products and services it offers, we can infer that Dr. Nutrition positions itself by targeting more than one market segment of healthy consumers. Types of potential customers identified are:

- Overweight (B2C)

- Waist watchers and fitness oriented (B2C)

- Beauty seekers (B2C)

- Natural and organic (B2C)

- Sustainable and socially responsible (B2C)

- Beauty centers (B2B)

- Medical Clinics (B2B)

The advertising strategies deployed by Dr. Nutrition should consider the different types of potential customers. The same strategy could work very well with a customer seeking to lose weight, but may not have the same effect on a customer seeking natural ingredients. The three advertising approaches (cognitive, affective and conative) can be applied as follows to develop the marketing strategy of Dr. Nutrition using suitable advertising executional frameworks.

"Smart Diet Natural Fat Loss" is a weight loss product which consists of pills that help to control appetite. Demand for this product is initiated by overweight customers, and potentially waist watchers. Promotion should start with information about the ingredients of the product, its benefits and attributes and its mechanism to reduce weight. It is important for weight loss customers to cognitively process this information to get convinced about making the purchase. Such information is presented through testimonial and authoritative executional frameworks. Testimonials of previous customers can be used to build confidence in the product by presenting previous experiences of using the same product and comparing before and after images of documented results indicating amount of weight lost and time taken to achieve the results. Furthermore, promoting this product by an expert authority such as a doctor enhances source credibility and convinces the customer about the effective results of using this product.

A second type of product are Healthy gluten free and organics, which are desired by customers with special concern about the negative health impacts of added chemicals, conservatives and artificial additives to their food. These customers are sensitive about the health of their family and children in specific. They are also often socially responsible and prefer to use products produced by sustainable management. They probably have empathy towards the environment and are inclined towards natural beauty. Therefore, the advertising approach recommended for these products is the affective or emotional strategy. It is worth to note that many affective approaches tailor their ads around children. Take detergents advertisements for example: the child is usually unhappy about the chocolate stain that is covering his/her white outfit. The caring mother finds the solution to end her child's sadness by using the marketed detergent which magically removes the stain and generates the required results, and eventually leads the child happy and full of joy again. Another example is hand wash solutions such as lifeboy or Detol where the message is usually something similar to "protect your children" or "family". There certainly is a level of irrationality in these ads such as the unrealistic power of the detergent to remove the stain in no time, and the ability of the hand wash to remove 99% of bacteria. However, this does not stop consumers from buying the product which has been presented in an exaggerated executional