Marketing communications are essential for the brand to establish connection points with its target audience and influence their perception of the brand, throughout the interactions that may occur with it. As stated by Kotler and Keller (2012), marketing communications help to position the brand in consumers' minds, helping to enhance brand equity. Each communication option has its own characteristics that can help, at a certain time and place, to attract attention and awaken consumer interest, as well as gain trust and create greater involvement with the target audience. What seems evident in the literature is that these options can mutually influence each other, creating complementary and synergistic effects to influence consumers' perceptions and decisions in relation to the brand. However, it is necessary to ensure that there is no information overload and confusion because more touchpoints and volume of messages do not necessarily translate into an increase in influence (Keller, 2016; Kotler et al., 2017). Following the perspective of Keller (2016), the important thing is that the brand knows its market and realizes that traditional and digital communications make more sense and work better to win over consumers and achieve the brand's value objectives. Hence the importance of having an integrated marketing communication strategy, ensuring that all communication options adopted are consistent and clear to improve consumer exposure to the brand's offers and satisfy their information and interaction needs. Thus, the exploratory approach carried out led to the conclusion that the future of marketing communications will be increasingly digital, but traditional options will still be important to acquire and influence customers. Integrated marketing communication then becomes fundamental to ensure clearer, more relevant and adequate communication to the different communication needs and preferences of different target audiences. Once the brand is able to strategically manage this integration, and thus manage to reach and convince its target audience more easily, it will boost its brand value, through greater recognition and more favorable brand images by its customers. Future research steps include the adoption of an empirical methodology, aimed at a specific sector. This methodology includes a study of the brand's integrated marketing communication strategies, as well as an analysis of the profile of its consumers, in terms of the brand's perceived value and preferences and trends in the use of communications.

Question

1) After reading the text above, say answer: What are the most effective integrated marketing communication strategies for a brand to ensure consistency and clarity in its messages, in order to reach and influence its target audience in a way that is relevant and adequate to its needs , taking into account the adoption of both traditional and digital communication options, aiming at the potential increase in brand equity?