Integrated Marketing Communications - Essay Example

INTEGRATION AND COMMUNICATION Introduction The American Marketing Association defines Integrated Marketing Communications(IMC) as “a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time.” (www.ama.org). Many marketing entities define IMC as a holistic or a seamless communications strategy adopted by marketers to integrate a variety of functional areas of the marketing communications process such as advertising, promotion and selling. Integrated Marketing Communications, as a strategic function and a domain in the sphere of marketing has been evolving with a remarkable host of theoretical and practical applications. Its varied and dynamic functional applications and strategic directions have given it an additional dimension as a seminal marketing tool. Its strategic focus invariably places it on par with any other marketing concept of importance. IMC integrates all forms of communications within and without a business organization and facilitates a seamlessly designed pattern of communications to achieve the company’s marketing goals. This integration process involves horizontal integration, vertical integration, external integration, internal integration and data integration. For example horizontal integration takes place when the four concepts of the marketing mix are integrated with various corporate functions while vertically it occurs when hierarchically organized strata of marketing communications within the organization support corporate objectives at a higher level (Percy, 2008, p.11).When all these functional areas within the organization are seamlessly integrated with the customer through a strategic marketing campaign involving advertising and promotion, the picture of Integrated Marketing Communications is complete. What’s the role played by cost here? Evaluation Marketing Communications has been a well known strategic function of the modern business organization and Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) has now almost effectively replaced the former with a marked strategic focus on what’s known as “a holistic or seamless integration strategy to achieve better results in marketing in particular and long term corporate goals in general”. The above mentioned elements of the IMC strategy inevitably presuppose an efficacious marketing campaign across different marketing parameters and media platforms. The customer is given the kind of information that he wants. Such a sustained effort in marketing requires a highly intensive attention grabbing strategy. IMC enables the organization to build and sustain long term brand relationships Schultz and Schultz, 2003, p.285). The authors advocate a Return On Investment (ROI) approach in marketing to sustain these long term brand relationships and then emphasize the inevitability of IMC as the strategic imperative to achieve corporate goals. Wal-Mart built up a retailing empire by concentrating on brand loyalty. Thus its costs were drastically reduced. ROI requires performance related metrics to generate substantial returns on strategies and not investment (Lenskold, 2003, p.101). IMC has been advocated as a strategic imperative in the overall marketing plan of the business organization so that the customer and his loyalty can be integrated into the company’s marketing function as an integral element of marketing communications function. This approach has received considerable attention and scrutiny in the light of marcom’s importance in building up brand loyalty. A still wider in-depth analytical study of the subject would take us closer to its real implications for the whole corporate strategy and the marketing function. For instance the modern literature on the subject focuses on various facets of the marketing strategy including viral marketing. This last element is necessarily connected with modern communications technology and therefore by extension with speed and comparative costs (Iacobucci and Calder, 2002, p.95). Chapter 12 of this book dwells on how the World Wide Web could be utilized to carry out viral marketing campaigns to reach impregnable market segments. The strategy is nothing new to the modern business organization or the average marketing manager. The Amazon Company, E-bay and numerous online auction sites found it out a long time ago. Integration in communications occurs at a variety of levels. For example the horizontal element of IMC involves the marketing mix – product, price, place and promotion – and the whole gamut of corporate functions such as production, marketing, finance, quality management and transport. A vertical integration of IMC could occur through the involvement of vertically organized layers of the communication function of the organization in liaising with departmental heads to achieve predefined corporate objectives. Despite the fact that these business objectives are to be achieved with knowledge available about the unpredictable market force of demand, IMC helps by way of a prioritized communications tool to strategically position the marketing campaign of the organization (www.multimediamarketing.com). Chris Anderson exuberantly predicts the “death of mass markets” in his new book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More?” This ominous sign is written large on every corporate wall. But the crux of his argument is based on a very narrow interpretation of the mass market as an entity with predefined limits (Anderson, 2006, p.15). His assertion that there would be a countless number of niche markets for every imaginable product in the future is not convincing enough. It is all the more fallacious to think of IMC as a dead-end phenomenon that will have little or no use for the modern marketing manager in designing his marketing communications strategy to capture more market share. Amazon.com and E-bay stand out as unique success stories built on technological breakthroughs and not due to any apparent limits of the mass market. IMC is a new marketing paradigm in which establishing one more customer contact point means one less big advertisement on the television (Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lautherborn, 1996, p.88). As a corollary of Anderson’s above argument- less is sold by the firm though it has got more of the product- we can say that cost per sale will rise steeply in niche markets where IMC as a strategic function will remain stagnant or even deteriorate over time. In consumer-centric marketing, the organization assumes that cost per sale rises with diminishing brand loyalty, if the firm increases its marketing budget to recapture the lost market share by spending more. Brands build strong relations with customers (Wheeler, 2006, p.157). In other words the lost sales volume cannot be recouped without a corresponding rise in marketing expenditure. It is here that IMC plays a vital role in retaining customers of a product through building up long term relationships, thereby ensuring a minimum cash inflow, providing other things remain constant. Establishing a greater number of customer contact points through IMC involves a network of internal integration points as well. Farris et al in their book “Marketing Metrics: 50+ metrics Every Executive Should master” mentions “two key measures of a product’s popularity – penetration rate or market penetration rate and penetration share” (Farris et al, 2006, p.26). Market penetration rate or brand penetration rate is determined by IMC to a greater extent due to the fact that IMC strategy within the company is positively correlated with brand penetration rate. This premise has been questioned by a number of writers though. Internal communications strategy could also be translated into a cost-efficient customer-oriented communications strategy through IMC. Effective communications within the business organization have to be based on a sound internal strategy (Nichols et al, 1999, p.28). IMC does not work in the absence of an efficient internal strategy of communications. As for the external communications strategy in IMC, the overall success depends on how effectively the organization has reached the customer through its marketing campaign. It’s nonetheless greatly determined by relative costs of consistently running a program of external communications to achieve corporate goals. Seamless integration of his external marketing communications strategy with the internal strategy is one of the essential features for success. Data integration is also a very important aspect of IMC strategy. Data are analyzed to extrapolate sales trends so that future sales are accurately forecast now. However, it must be noted here that the relative value of existing customers might not equal the total IMC budget even to breakeven in the absence of strong positive brand loyalty (Aaker, 1996, p.22). Conclusion IMC emphasizes a broader marketing communications strategy that does not simply rely on advertising and a few forms of promotion. In fact, it requires an array of integrated tasks such as product placements, e-mails, point-of-sale posters and even cold-calling. Strategic media that are used by conventional marketers are not used my IMC marketing managers. Niche marketing strategies are more attractive under IMC. Sales data fed into computers are constantly examined to detect trends. Consumer Confidence Indices (CCI) are used to tally data stored on databases at research centers. The retailer has more to do with IMC than the manufacturer because it is the former who basically dominates communication time with the potential customer. Despite all these benefits there are some barriers to IMC as well. For instance, the cost involved in sustaining such an intensively focused marketing strategy could be prohibitive because the training and education of personnel will entail considerable expenditure (Smith and Taylor, 2004, p.17). According to some writers it is just “traditional marketing dressed up new clothing” (Fitzgerald and Arnott, 1999, p.18). REFERENCES 1. Aaker, David A, (1996), Building Strong Brands (Bargain Price), New York, The Free Press. 2. Anderson, Chris (2006), The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, New York, Hyperion Publishing. 3. Definition of Integrated Marketing Communications, American Marketing Association, Retrieved from www.amanet.org, on July 26, 2008 4. Farris, Paul W, Bendle, Neil T, Pfeiffer, Phillip E and Reibstein, David J (2006), Marketing Metrics: 50 + Metrics Every Executive Should Master, Philadelphia, Wharton School Publishing. 5. Fitzgerald, Maureen and Arnott, David (1999), Marketing Communications Classics: An International Collection of Classic and Contemporary Papers, London, Cengage Lrng Business Press. 6. Integrated Marketing Communications, retrieved on July 26, 2008. from www.multimediamarketing.com. 7. Iacobucci, Dawn and Calder, Bobby J, (2002), Kellogg on Integrated Marketing , New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 8. Lenskold, James D, (2003), Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability, New York, McGraw-Hill. 9. Nichols, Ralph J, Stevens, Leonard A, Bartolome, Fernando and Argyris, Chris (1999), Harvard Business Revies on Effective Business Communication, Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing. 10. Percy, Larry (2008), Strategic Integrated Marketing Communications, Oxford, Butterworth Heinemann. 11. Schultz, Don F and Schultz Heidi (2003), IMC, The Next Generation: Five Steps For Delivering and Measuring Financial Returns, New York, McGraw-Hill. 12. Schultz, Don F, Tannenbaum, Stanley and Robert, Lautherborn (1996), The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, New York, McGraw Hill. 13. Smith, Paul R and Taylor, Jonathan (2004), Marketing Communications: An Integrated Approach, London, Kogan Page Ltd. 14. Wheeler, Alina, (2006), Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building and Maintaining Strong Brands, New jersey, John Wiley & Sons. Read More