Intregrating Marketing Communication

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is a management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation. The concept of IMC has emerged and since the mid-1990’s it has come to the fore and attracted considerable attention in the literature. To explain the need of analyzing and exploring this concept, we should commence by examining the development of the concept through its evolution.

Exploring the literature on IMC, we can find the following definitions:

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.”

Philip Kotler defined IMC as, "the concept under which a company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent and compelling message about the organization and its products".

Schultz (1993) defined IMC as concept of marketing communication planning that combine and evaluate strategic role of different communication discipline to get the clarity, consistency and greater impact.

Percy et al. (2001) IMC is planning and execution of all marketing communications in a same way to meet the objectives.

Raman and Naik (2005) defined the IMC in following words, ―an IMC program plans and execute various marketing activities with consistency so that its total impact exceeds the sum of each activity.

Duncan ( 2002) A cross-functional process for creating and nourishing profitable relationship with customers and other stakeholders by strategically controlling or influencing all messages send to these groups and encouraging data-driven purposeful dialogue with them.

IMC is also defined as...