Lesson 1: IMC

I. Definitions of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

• According to Kotler and Armstrong, Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is a concept in which a
“company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communication channels–mass media
advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, packaging, and
others–to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its
products.”
• Integrated Marketing Communication according to Schultz and Kitchen “is a strategic business process
used to plan, develop, execute, and evaluate co-ordinated measurable, persuasive brand communication
programs overtime with consumers, customers, prospects and other targeted, relevant external and internal
audience.”
• Tom Duncan defined IMC as “A process for managing the customer relationships that drive brand value.
More specifically, it is a cross-functional process for creating and nourishing profitable relationships with
customers and other stakeholders by strategically controlling or influencing all messages sent to these
groups and encouraging data-driven, purposeful dialogue with them.”
In short, Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is “Joint planning, execution and coordination of
all areas of marketing communication and also understanding the consumer and what the consumer
actually responds to.”

II. The Shift from Fragmented to Integrated Marketing Communications

Prior to the emergence of integrated marketing communications during the 1990s, mass communications—the
practice of relaying information to large segments of the population through television, radio, and other media—
dominated marketing. Marketing was a one-way feed. Advertisers broadcasted their offerings and value
propositions with little regard for the diverse needs, tastes, and values of consumers.

Often, this "one size fits all" approach was costly and uninformative due to the lack of tools for measuring
results in terms of sales. But as methods for collecting and analyzing consumer data through single-source
technology such as store scanners improved, marketers were increasingly able to correlate promotional activities
with consumer purchasing patterns. Companies also began to downsize their operations and expand marketing
tasks within their organizations. Advertising agencies were also expected to understand and provide all marketing
functions, not just advertising, for their clients.

Today, corporate marketing budgets are allocated toward trade promotions, consumer promotions,
branding, public relations, and advertising. The allocation of communication budgets away from mass media
and traditional advertising has raised the importance of IMC importance for effective marketing. Now, marketing
is viewed more as a two-way conversation between marketers and consumers.

III. The Tools of Integrated Marketing Communications

The IMC process generally begins with an integrated marketing communications plan that describes the different
types of marketing, advertising, and sales tools that will be used during campaigns. These are largely promotional
tools, which include everything from search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and banner advertisements to
webinars and blogs. Traditional marketing communication elements such as newspapers, billboards, and
magazines may also be used to inform and persuade consumers. Marketers must also decide on the appropriate
combination of traditional and digital communications for their target audience to build a strong brand-
consumer relationship. Regardless of the brand's promotional mix, it is important that marketers ensure their
messaging is consistent and credible across all communication channels.
IV. Benefits of Integrated Marketing Communications
With so many products and services to choose from, consumers are often overwhelmed by the vast number of
advertisements flooding both online and offline communication channels. Marketing messages run the risk of
being overlooked and ignored if they are not relevant to consumers' needs and wants.

One of the major benefits of integrated marketing communications is that marketers can clearly and
effectively communicate their brand's story and messaging across several communication channels to create
brand awareness. IMC is also more cost-effective than mass media since consumers are likely to interact with
brands across various forums and digital interfaces. As consumers spend more time on computers and mobile
devices, marketers seek to weave together multiple exposures to their brands using different touch points.
Companies can then view the performance of their communication tactics as a whole instead of as fragmented
pieces.

The other benefit of integrated marketing communications is that it creates a competitive advantage for companies
looking to boost their sales and profits. This is especially useful for small- or mid-sized firms with limited staff
and marketing budgets. IMC immerses customers in communications and helps them move through the various
stages of the buying process. The organization simultaneously consolidates its image, develops a dialogue, and
nurtures its relationship with customers throughout the exchange. IMC can be instrumental in creating a seamless
purchasing experience that spurs customers to become loyal, lifelong customers.
Conclusion
From merely passing on a message to catchy jingles, using humor, and subtle ironies to online communication
over various social media and other channels, marketing has changed.
Brands are looking out for ways to connect with their audiences across the globe.
The solution, integrated marketing, combines traditional and modern marketing strategies. It provides us
with the best of both the worlds to reach the appropriate stakeholders in the process.
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) basically combines various marketing strategies that boost one
another. The aim is to have all the channels work in aggregation rather than seclusion.
For instance, a company might be promoting a new product through various media such as print, social media, web
along with others. Each media will promote the product in its own way, depending on its capabilities and
limitations. But the message that is conveyed and to whom it is conveyed remains the same. After all, it directs the
audience in the same direction. Integrated marketing communication ensures that all the correspondence
received by a customer or a prospect is relevant.
This communication remains consistent over all the communication media. It gives your customers or prospects a
seamless experience over all the channels while interacting with your brand.
V. Step-by-Step Exploration of the IMC Process
IMC makes use of different promotional methods across channels to reach a befitting audience with the proper
message.
There are six essential steps to be followed while designing your IMC strategy. Let’s go through each of them one-
by-one:
Step 1: Know Your Audience from Behavioral Data
Never start without proper market research. Ensure that your audience is defined correctly.
You should always know what kind of audience you want to target based on what you are marketing.
Here, behavioral data will give us insights about what the prospects do, what their preferences are relating to
what we are offering.
Demographic data tells us more about their age, gender, education, geography, and so on.
Segmenting your audience based on these data points will help you know which section of your audience is more
likely to opt for your product.
Step 2: Develop a Situational or Contextual Analysis
Generally known as SWOT analysis, it gives you an insight into the external and internal factors that can affect
your brand.
Analyzing your internal and external environments will provide you with some extra information while designing
your marketing strategy.
It will tell you what are your weaknesses that you need to work on and what are the strengths that you can
leverage upon.
Step 3: Determine Your Marketing Objectives
Before starting with your marketing efforts, it is necessary to define the objectives for your marketing campaigns.
It involves all that you wish to achieve through your marketing efforts and what your brand wants to
communicate to your target audience.
Following are some of the objectives that you could set for yourself:
• Developing awareness about your brand in the market.
• Improve your brand image.
• Improve the sales of your product.
• Reinforce your customer’s decision to go with your brand.

Step 4: Establish Your Budget

It is necessary to know your available resources before starting out with designing any plans or strategies.
The type of budget that your company allocates towards your marketing campaigns can be a percentage of the sales
or a percentage of the profit.
Your budget also depends on the size of your organization and what they can afford.
Step 5: Defining Your Strategies and Tactics
In this step, you need to draw out the strategies and define the tactics aligned with the objectives that you had set
in the third step.
Strategies and tactics define, in detail, how your marketing efforts would unfold to achieve your objectives. These
methods should be described adhering to the budget set in the previous steps.
Step 6: Evaluation and Measurement
The final step always is evaluation and measurement. Here, we can make use of various metrics, such as:
• Traffic to your website.
• Change in sales numbers.
• Social media metrics, such as an increase in the engagement of your social media page or increase in the
follower count.
Evaluating the performance of your strategies will help you to understand the effectiveness of your strategy.
It will also help you figure out any improvement, if necessary, to be made to your strategy in the next iteration
since IMC is cyclical.
After following all these steps properly, IMC will be well-defined for your organization. And as a brand, you can
conduct your marketing activities more efficiently.
You will be able to connect with your target audience with ease as well, providing them the best experience as
well.
Today, customer service is key, and customers do not hesitate to take on a brand on a public forum as well. Hence
a proper IMC will enable a company to avoid such incidents if any.

Why Companies are Adopting Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)?

Companies look at Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) as a way to coordinate and manage their
marketing communication programmes to ensure that they give customers a consistent message about the company
or its brands. IMC represents an improvement over the traditional method of treating the various marketing
and communication elements as virtually separate activities. The IMC approach helps companies identify the most
appropriate and effective methods for communicating and building relationships with their customer as well as
other stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, investors, interest groups and the general public.
• Can consolidate image of company, develop a dialogue and nurture its relationship with
customer: Integrated Marketing Communications focuses on using all the organizations advertising and
promotional efforts towards delivering the same united message. It can make the intended information and
messages including slogans, quotes, facts, and figures more consistent in the process of transmitting
messages from producers to buyers. It can be used in consolidating the image of company, develop a
dialogue and nurture its relationship with customer. Clear and consistent marketing message are able to
reach the target audience in the shortest time without confusing them and ensure that all the segment of the
campaign can be reached. Hence, it creates a long term relationships with our target customer. These
customers could be present or future, internal or external. This will help company to keep the profitable
customer for life. Adversely, if different division handling their own marketing activities in the company,
it may result in the situation in which sales people giving out different marketing message while corporate
department giving out another inconsistent message that lead to confusion. Lack of consistent of messages
just may confuse or distract the buyers. In addition, it also helps buyers to shorten their buying process,
especially stage of search information about each alternative of products with different brand. In
conclusion, IMC is very important in deliver the consistent image and message.
• Reduce Confusion of the product: Through IMC, buyer can reduce their confusion when choosing a
product which can deliver superior value and satisfactions to them by presented in a planed sequence with
communication tools. IMC also help buyers by update new information about a product or special offers;
give reminders about existing product timely and others. Therefore, buyers and consumers can afford a
new product within fastest time and repurchase a product when they are always persuaded by the
communication tools such as advertising or buy additional services and products from the same sellers.
• Increase the profit through increase effectiveness: Besides, Integrated Marketing Communication also
can increase the profit by increase its effectiveness. This is because impact of unified message on the
customer’s mind is bigger than impact of disjointed myriad of messages. By using Integrated Marketing
Communication, message transmitted has a better chance of cutting through the barriers of commercial
message that bombard customer each day. When customer received a crystal clear message about the
product and service, they will tend to build a long term relationship with the company and hence the market
share will increase gradually. It will be profitable for the company for long term. By providing clearer
message and develop a strong strategy positioning company product in the market, competitive advantage
can be delivered to differentiate themselves from other competitor. Thus it will increase the customer
satisfaction and promote increasing profit in the long run. It can be proved by research from Centre for
Integrated Marketing which shown that by adopting integrated marketing communication, it can enhance
business performance by 10% to 25%.
• Integrated Marketing Communication can boost sales by stretching message across several
communication tools: It is profitable when customer practice Integrated Marketing Communication
which will deliver superior value more effectively by using a combination of variety communication
channel like sales promotion and direct marketing. By stretching messages across several communication
tools, purchase can be increased gradually because it create more avenues for customer to become aware
about the product itself and its benefit. It will definitely boost sales by gradually increase in customer
purchase. This is because by using the integrated marketing communication, we can deliver our
information toward more specific target audiences. It is like a more specialized media compare to other
mass media. So, it can reach the potential target customer with the high accuracy and the probability of
those customers to purchase product offer is higher. It can maximize the effect on customer with lower cost
if integrated marketing communication is used wisely.
• Integrated marketing communication can help the company to save money: Any communication tool
should integrate with and draw on as many other communication tools as possible in order to maximize
cost effectiveness. Integrated marketing communication can saves a lot of money in the promotional effort
as compared to other who does not adopt it. This is because it enables the company to reduce unnecessary
cost by cutting down number of agencies. By choosing the same service supplier, it can coordinate
photography, design and printing of advertisement and also sales literature. Hence it will save a lot of
money and work effort because it avoids duplication in areas such as graphics and photography. Moreover,
it also can save a lot of time. Times can be saved when we organized meeting that bring all the agencies
together for briefing, creative session, tactical or strategy planning. Hence, workload and subsequently
stress level can be reduced when company practice integrated marketing communication.
• Reliability of the messages: In the un-integrated communication marketing, sellers or marketers always
send out of disjointed of messages and information to buyers. As a result, it directly dilutes the impact of
messages and many messages will fail to arrive, misunderstood, simply ignored by buyers because of its
reliability. Moreover, without using IMC method, it may bring anxiety frustrate and confuse to buyers, and
then buyers will not have confidence and trust in this brand and their product. This also gives bad effect
such as transactions in market which cannot carry out smoothly, and sometimes buyers are unlikely to buy
the product again because the performance of the product cannot meet their expectations and cannot
provide them satisfactions. Then it affects the volume of product sales, which also give bad impact to the
business objectives and normally sellers were blamed as they did not achieve the target given to them. The
problem of un-integrated communication marketing can be solving by using IMC method. Ability of sellers
to use several communication tools for creates the messages and information in a form that can be easily
understood by the buyers which give reliable, inspire, reassure of sense to buyers in the buying process.
• Customer Database: Moreover, IMC also provides customer databases to sellers and marketers to
identify information about buyers precisely and accurately. Sellers can know detail information such as
which buyers need what information throughout their buying life, name and email address of every
customers the sellers have sold to and also include what the customers purchase and when they purchase
the product. Based on all information inside the customer databases, sellers and marketers can decide which
promotional strategy should used to create effectiveness in targeting their market. In other meaning,
customer databases can be say is the best marketing tool in the IMC for to track buyer’s interest precisely.
• Relationship marketing: In the IMC method also include “relationship marketing” which is a form of
marketing strategy emphasizes customer satisfaction and retention, rather than focus on sales transactions
for obtain short-term profits only. “Relationship marketing” different from other types of marketing
strategy in that it can recognizes value of customer relationships in long term and protect customers from
intrusive sale promotional messages and advertising. Besides that, it also builds a bond of loyalty with
buyers which can provide them protection from the unavoidable onslaught of competition in market.
Sellers and marketers can gain competitive advantages when they can to keep a long-term customer for
lifetime, offering greater customer value within IMC method.

Barriers to Integrated Marketing Communication

In spite of its many profits, Integrated Marketing Communication has many barricades. Totaling up to the
accustomed confrontation to adjust and the unique troubles of being in touch with an extensive diversity of goal
spectators, there’re further more obstruction which defies Integrated Marketing Communication. If some
companies use integrated marketing communication for its vascular advantages other companies do not prefer to
use it for several reasons:

1. Functional Silos: Resources, support and guidance of upper management are needed to build a successful
integrated marketing communications campaign. The job of upper management is to make sure that all the
resources are thoroughly no matter is for budgets, sharing data or people across teams. However, the
problem now is integrated marketing communication don’t control by one manager only. All the managers
involve in the information transmitting process have to work together in controlling the process. It mean
that all the manager of advertising team, public relation team and also the marketing team have to
coordinate in the process of delivering information about the product and service of the company to the
target customer. When the control is shared among all the team manager, which can prove to be a difficult
concept for some member of upper management, creating a barrier to integrated marketing communication.
2. Restricts creativity: IMC can restrict creativity. With a variety of team involved in launching an integrated
marketing campaign, each team have to ensure that all the task carry out must fit the overall goals and
message of the campaign. As an example, when the promotional team comes up with a creative idea for a
sweepstakes, it must match with the integrated campaign goal to ensure the communication process
effectiveness. But, if it doesn’t fit with the realm of integrated marketing goals, the creative plan cannot
implement by the particular team no matter how high the level of creativeness it may seem. All the teams
have to follow the unified strategy to convey a consistent message to send to our target customer.
3. Lack of Resources: When the integrated marketing communication is practiced, it requires the entire
member in the organization to take part in the process of transmitting the information to the customer. So,
in order to make sure the process of transmitting consistent and useful information to carry out smoothly,
the entire member in the organization needs to have the required knowledge and skill to executive the
strategic plan. Because skills and knowledge are the key needs, some staff members receive training in
areas they may not familiar with to ensure the success of the transmitting information about the product
and service the company offer. Hence, it will increase the company cost and hence it will become more
costly to practice integrated marketing communication. Besides, integrated marketing communication also
required proper planning and time management to ensure the communication transmitting process become
more effectively. When the marketing team delays their work process, it will affect the sales rape work task
because they are interdependence. So, information transmitting process tends to become less effective
when practice integrated marketing communication.
4. Different Corporate Cultures: Integrated marketing communications generally include more than just
one company working to put together in a campaign. For example, pitching articles to the press about a
product launch is in charge by the public relations firm and a print advertisement may develop by
an advertising agency. The problem occur when each company take part in the customer transmitting
process tend to operate in its own unique culture, but when it is needed to meshed with a new company
culture, the result is not always positive. There is one of the potential barriers the organization must
overcome when the company practice integrated marketing communication. As an example, the
advertising company may take relaxed approach to completing task, paying little or no attention to looming
deadlines, but the public relation firm may be dead-line driven. This different culture between the
companies may cause the integrated marketing communication process less effective to carry out.