The Adoption Of Integrated Marketing Communications - Essay Example

Integrated marketing communications is a marketing strategy that is extremely common-sense. IMC is an emerging concept. Therefore, it does not as yet have theoretical framework that is mutually accepted by all academicians or scholars. A number of scholars, however, are contributing to the building of a theory base. That is, in the rapidly changing advertising environment now found in many countries, there has been an inevitable calling for a more coordinated and systematized marketing communication concept and approach, which have often taken the form of Integrated Marketing Communications.

Integrated marketing communications has been defined as a management philosophy (Stewart, 1996), an educational movement (Hutton, 1996), and a unifying business practice (Burnett and Moriarty, 1998), among others (cf. Stewart, 1996). These inconsistencies in defining and measuring IMC have prevented the development of a cohesive research stream in this area. In order to build on and extend previous research, we chose to adopt the original definition of Duncan and Everett (1993), who define IMC as "the strategic coordination of all messages and media used by an organization to influence its perceived brand value.

" The companies, who have adopted integrated marketing communications, use one strategy for everything instead of dividing communications into several departments. It is a re-invented marketing strategy and it must espouse two fundamental principles:1. The first principle stipulates that marketers should view all forms of media, print, electronic equally. No precedence should be given to one form of media over the other, for example, to newspapers over television etc. Marketers should possess a totally unbiased and prejudice-free approach towards all form of marketing media.2. The second principle that is a very important part of the marketing strategy is that the people responsible for marketing in every organization must approach all kinds of marketing media with a strategic approach and do proper planning in this regard.

The background behind the emergence of IMC comes from three major areas. First, from the corporate or client side, an increasing competitiveness and higher risk in the marketplace brought about by aggressive activities by management's merger and acquisition group have been required simply to meet the consumer's increasingly diverse needs more successfully through a variety of new marketing strategies. Second, from the media and market side, weakening power of traditional marketing and advertising due to the rapid development of information technology has increased the search for more effective and cost-efficient methods in marketing communications.

Third, from the consumer side, on-going changes and increasingly diversified consumer lifestyles have encouraged advertisers to develop more elaborate and quicker response communication disciplines.The traditional advertising media base has now been replaced with new forms of media. Thus, the companies now have to adopt new and emerging forms of