Chapter Six
Integrated Marketing Communications

You must not expect the customer to understand the benefits of your products or your technologies. That’s your job! Educate!

Akio Morita KBE (1921-1999), entrepreneur, co-founder Sony.
‘Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony’.

Business Context

In this chapter, we explore the nature and meaning of integrated marketing communications (IMC) in driving profitable growth and contributing to stakeholder value, including consumers, channel partners, employees, suppliers, and investors.

Like many new management concepts emerging from academics, consultants, and practitioners, the core logic of IMC is difficult to refute. In a nutshell, the messages an organisation wishes to communicate externally, particularly those conveying its core brand values, should be coherent and consistent regardless of the media (‘route to mind’) employed.

Such media include advertising, the sales force, exhibitions, sponsorship, point-of-sale, packaging, public relations, word-of-mouth, trade fairs, websites, social networks, social media, etc. As always, the logic of this simple management principle is easy to describe but enormously challenging to apply in practice. For example, it is very common, particularly in large organisations, that completely different departments have been created to focus on each of the media mentioned above, and, ironically, they often don’t communicate internally particularly well between themselves.

SMEs, meanwhile, typically rely on external agencies to manage their communications. It is essential to ensure that the company’s core brand values are adhered to and don’t conflict with internally managed communications, e.g. the salesforce.

Throughout the chapter, we explore marketing communications (marcomms) and organisational challenges as core themes and evaluate core marcomms practical frameworks, methodologies, processes, and tools.

While covering a broad cross-section of these, I also pay particular attention to new forces in communication media, such as the entrance to the advertising industry of companies such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube. Among other impacts, the use of new analytics (e.g. behavioural responses to marcomms investments) and business models (e.g. ‘pay-per-click’ advertising) have transformed the competitive landscape in an industry (marketing services) experiencing transformational and unprecedented change in the contemporary digital age.

Digital Platforms

‘Digital platform’ broadly refers to the use of e-commerce and internet-related technologies to distribute products and services from supplier to consumer. ‘E-tailing’ (for example, Alibaba, Amazon, e-bay, Etsy, Gumtree) typically (but not exclusively) still requires the physical distribution of products through the traditional supply chain and logistics systems once a purchase is made, e.g. consumer electronics, clothes, food, etc.

In other product and service categories, goods are indeed physically distributed online, for example, music and movies via streaming (e.g. Amazon Music/Prime Video, Apple Music/TV+, Disney+, Netflix, Spotify, Tencent Music), books (e.g. Audible, Kindle, Kobo), travel services (e.g. Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago), and financial services (‘fintech’, e.g. Starling Bank, Monzo, Revolut, AJ Bell Youinvest, e-Torro).

Digital platforms should not be confused with communications media (e.g. advertising, sales promotions, publicity, etc.). However, there are many cases where the two converge, a trend I explore in some detail throughout the chapter, particularly the opportunities this provides to the SME sector.

Indicative Content

    • Combining marketing strategy, the marketing mix and IMC (aligns with Chapter Four).
    • Buyer behaviour, customer focus, brand positioning and IMC (aligns with Chapter Five).
    • Pursuing the ideal: delivering IMC strategies.
    • Customer relationship management: IMC strategies for customer profitability.
    • Managing the communications mix: advertising and sales promotion.
    • Managing the communications mix: public relations, sponsorship and exhibitions.
    • Managing the communications mix: alignment with key account management (KAM) and negotiation strategies.
    • Innovation strategies and IMC: influencing the adoption and diffusion of innovations in emerging, established and international markets (aligns with Chapter Three).
    • A structured and systematic approach to IMC: strategy and operations.
    • IMC in the digital age and the struggle for control.
    • Contemporary marketing methods from an IMC perspective, including Marketing 3.0, 4.0, viral marketing, smartphone marketing, guerrilla marketing, ambush marketing, suggestive marketing, influencer marketing, etc.
    • Service industry IMC: communicating intangibles.
    • Evaluating marketing communications investments: a financial perspective.
    • Managing organisational reputation: a leadership perspective.
    • Organisational design for effective and efficient marketing communications: an organisational behaviour perspective (aligns with Chapter Eight).

Learning Outcomes

After studying this chapter, readers will:

    • Build upon their knowledge and experience of market segmentation and brand positioning principles within the traditional and digital communications context (aligns with Chapters Four and Five).
    • Be able to undertake a comprehensive competitor and differential advantage analysis regarding multiple ‘routes to mind’: IMC management audit.
    • Have the ability to create and manage successful IMC strategies.
    • Be able to analyse and enhance IMC performance.
    • Understand the components of IMC strategy (traditional and digital).
    • IMC project planning and IMC management.
    • Have the ability to drive IMC mapping and optimisation strategies.
    • Understand the need for organisational effectiveness to ensure successful IMC management implementation.
    • Justify IMC investments using traditional and innovative investment appraisal techniques.
    • Apply the principles of IMC management to create and/or contribute to preparing and implementing comprehensive IMC programmes using proven practical frameworks, methodologies, processes and tools.

 

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All content © Colin Edward Egan, 2024