IMC Case Analysis | October 15
2012
| Air France Case Analysis |

Submitted by Group 4: IMC Section B Amber Kumar Yadav | Anshul Kumar | Arnab Guha Mallik | Darshan Sullia | Ashutosh Vikram | 15/68 | 15/71 | 15/74 | 15/81 | 15/210 |

1) Should Media Contacts recommend a uniform strategy for Air France across search engine publishers? Or would it be more effective to tail each publisher strategy to maximize return on investment?
From the case, the optimal search marketing campaign is based on choosing effective allocation of ad dollars across the various search engines, as well as selecting appropriate keywords and bid strategies for placement on the search result page for Internet users. In determining the optimal strategy, the case presents background information on the airline industry as well as the Internet search options available at the time, including Google, Microsoft MSN, Yahoo!, and Kayak. Additionally, background information is provided on SEM and its associated costs and means of measuring the successfulness of each marketing effort. The table Exhibit 6 included line item information for keywords and keyword groups for each campaign and search engine, implying that strategies between each search engine is at least slightly difference, although high level conceptually they all lie on similar principles.
However in another case, the author suggests that buyers using search engines to look for information tend to trust and follow links displayed in the editorial section of the search-results page. Most on-line sellers, however, do not invest in search engine optimization (SEO) to get higher search-results rankings for their listings, but instead prefer paid placements. They explain that SEO is more expensive than paid placements, produces results that do not justify its cost, and does not consistently lead to high search-results