Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)

Managers have always had to face the challenge of creating awareness among targeted customers and bringing them to the point of interest and confidence when they will reach for their wallets and make a purchase. Over the years various forms of marketing communications have been used for this purpose: media advertising, personal selling, direct mail, and so forth. Web marketing is a recent addition to this communications mix.
With people receiving so many messages from so many sources, managers face a new challenge: producing a consistent brand message at each customer touch point. The answer to this challenge is a strategic process generally known as integrated marketing communications (IMC).
The American Marketing Association suggests that IMC is “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.” This concept includes many online and offline marketing channels. Online marketing channels include any e-marketing campaigns or programs, from search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, affiliate, email, banner to latest web related channels for webinar, blog, RSS, podcast, and Internet TV. Offline marketing channels are traditional print (newspaper, magazine), mail order, public relation, billboard, radio, and television.

IMC's goal is to use multiple modes of communication to foster awareness of a company's products or services, inform people about features and benefits, and move them to make a purchase. Those multiple modes must be consistent and complementary.

The Goal of Marketing Communications
The ultimate goal of marketing communications is to influence someone to make a purchase. But like most goals, it is attainable only through a number of process steps. Consider these:
1. Create awareness. People will not buy a product or service that they are not aware of. Consequently, companies go to great lengths to create awareness.
2. Provide knowledge. This step involves providing information about product or service features. What is the product? What does it do?
3. Create a favorable impression. People don't buy features; instead, they buy benefits--things that will make their lives better, solve a nagging problem, or save them money.
4. Attain a preferred position in the customer's mind. Deliver the clear objective to the customer to get the strategic position in customer's mind. Make the customer realizes about the benefits that other companies don't give.
5. Create a purchase intention. If the marketer has done a good job of addressing earlier steps in the process, the customer will resolve to make a purchase.
6. Make the sale. If all the other steps have been completed, the prospect will become a customer. The cash register will ring.

Those are the steps that typically lead to a purchase. An alternative is to use market research to classify targeted customers in the following order: (1) is unaware of our product; (2) is aware of the product but considers it similar to others being considered; (3) is favorably disposed to our product; (4) would select our product if the purchase were made today; and (5) buys our product.

Communications Vehicles
A marketer with a generous budget has access to an arsenal of communication options: electronic media (TV and radio), print media (newspapers and magazines), direct mail solicitations, telemarketing, personal selling, and the Web. Even public relations is a means of communicating with current and potential customers.
Conceptually, the vehicles of marketing communications can be categorized in two dimensions. The first dimension relates to targeting and customization, which can be divided into two parts. The first part is communications that address an individual prospect whose needs and interests already known by the company (targeted communication). Another part is mass communications (scattered communication), as in a TV commercial that runs on network TV during the final game of the World Series. That ad will be watched by millions of people--an undifferentiated cross section of society. As a practical matter, the commercial cannot be targeted to individual viewers or customized in any way.

The next dimension is divided into one-way and two-way communication, with an intermediate section. A TV commercial is strictly a one-way message; it can create awareness, and it may impart information about the features and benefits of the product, but not much else. The salesperson's visit with the purchasing manager, in contrast, is a two-way conversation in which the salesperson can describe his wares and the buyer can describe her particular needs and her reservations about pricing or terms, and can ask for specific information. The salesperson and the buyer can negotiate and perhaps conclude with a transaction. This two-way communication is effective in moving the buyer along the final steps of the purchasing process.
In choosing communication vehicles, it is necessary if company considers where potential customers are in the purchasing process, then use the most highly targeted vehicles that company can do.

Where Public Relations Fits In?
Public relations (PR) is a form of communication that aims to increase public awareness and understanding of, and to promote a favorable opinion of, a company, its products, and its services. PR tools include press releases, speeches by executives, and public service activities. Unlike other forms of communication, PR operates through unpaid channels. Consequently, company has no control over how their PR efforts will play out.
The primary virtue of PR in marketing communications is casting the company in a favorable light among the general public. Some of that aura can be expected to adhere to the company's products and services.

Formulating the Integrated Marketing Communications Program
According to Harvard Business School Press Article, there are several aspects that need to be concerned in planning the communications program, usually called the Six M's model:
1. Market. To whom is your communication addressed?
2. Mission. What is your objective in communicating?
3. Message. What specific points must be communicated?
4. Media. Which communication vehicles should you use to get the message across?
5. Money. How much will be budgeted for the effort?
6. Measurement. How will you assess the impact of your communication?

The Management Challenge
Marketing managers have an important two-part challenge with respect to IMC: (1) finding the best way to allocate financial resources in support of their brands, and (2) coordinating their spending so that all customer touch points are getting consistent messages.
Because channels of distribution and customer communication are so many and so varied nowadays, managers must optimize resource allocation among all the activities that touch customers: packaging, point-of-sale display and promotion, Web-based selling, and ad agency work. They may find themselves pulled in different directions by the advice of brand consultants, direct marketing agencies, e-commerce advisers, and after-sales support. Managers must also ensure that each of these activities represents the product to customers in a consistent manner. To put yourself in the customer's shoes is a practical way to avoid inconsistency.

There are also other challenges that can come up in implementing IMC:
1. Roles of Individual Media
This goal may appear simple but, for companies with different teams of people working on each element of the campaign, it can be a challenge to create effective advertising for all media using the same images and messages. Tactically, most marketers think the goal of each medium is different. For example, television ads are generally used for awareness generation, print to educate, and outdoor and radio to keep the message top-of-mind. In reality, the goal of all advertising, including packaging, is to sell. (Young, 2006)
2. Identifying Best Marketing Elements
The biggest difficulty IMC marketers face is summed up by Chuck Young of Ameritest, “Even though the different elements in a campaign are designed to work together, that does not mean that all the creative executions will work equally well.” This obstacle can be overcome by using advertising to identify the images and messages that will work best across media platforms. Marketers cannot compare a banner ad’s click-through rate to a print ad’s eye-tracking data to a TV commercial’s branded attention score. Therefore, it is important the ad research system provides performance metrics that make it easy for ad managers to make comparisons across media platforms. (Young, 2006)