Advertising in the 21st century Unit 9 Project - Essay Example

This piece of research work addresses the relevance of IMC in today’s business world and examines how this can be implemented as a strategic step for advertising campaign. This paper identifies three companies at different levels, one from the Fortune 500 lists, one form the INC lists and one from the major online shopping companies and describes how these companies can effectively use IMC as basic strategy for their marketing. Lamb, Hair and McDaniel (2004) described that integrated marketing communication is a careful combination of all promotional messages like traditional advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, event marketing, public relation, interactive marketing and so on so as to assure consistency in whatever messages being communicated to the targeted markets (p. 413). Belch and Belch (2007) emphasized that IMC is a marketing process of planning, designing and developing brand communication program with customers, employees and associates in order to build short term financial benefits and long term brand value (p. 11). Various communication tools are effectively coordinated based on company’s goal to reach different target market more effectively and thus to create short term profitability and long term brand equity and brand loyalty among the customers.

IMC is a process in which companies accelerate its revenues and returns by aligning communication objectives with business goals (Schultz and Schultz, 2004, P. 3). Business goals normally include profitable operation as well successful marketing of goods or services being offered to the customers. IMC helps companies achieve their objectives by aligning and coordinating various elements of communication including advertising, sales promotion, direct selling, public relation etc. IMC has become relevant in today’s business because it not only