Management and intrinsic hurdles in the development process of integrated communication between service providers and consumers

Integrated communication is an effective strategic tool that enables creating and maintaining tight dialogue and cooperation between service providers and consumers, managing communication chaos, information flow, matching consumers’ needs. Its successful application requires reorganizing the communication processes, implementing their strategic changes, introducing new attitudes towards work and new culture, striving for overall synergy. Under such changes, this article aims at identifying the hurdles hindering the effective integration of smooth service providers and consumers’ communication. Testing hypotheses based on a survey demonstrates that hurdles reflecting employees’ competences, integrated communication development resources and result evaluation are more frequent in the stage of communication channel integration than in the functional one

'IMC is dead. Long live IMC': Academics' versus practitioners' views

The purpose of this research is to establish whether academics and practitioners are similar in their perceptions of what Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is and the role it has to play in today's dynamic landscape. This objective is achieved first by examining the IMC literature to establish the main themes that underpin the construct and to identify the topics that have been most discussed over the past 10 years. These findings are then utilised to perform a content analysis of 10 essays that were published by Campaign magazine in December 2010 by high-profile practitioners under the heading of ‘What's Next in Integration’. The findings indicate that there are differences in the perception of academics and practitioners on IMC, mainly in the area of internal audiences and its strategic role within an organisation. These findings are of interest to academics, clients, and agencies, as these areas of misunderstanding may be acting as a barrier to IMC implementation. This research identifies significant differences in how IMC is perceived by academics and practitioners in the advertising industry. This identification is important because organisations can only benefit from IMC fully if there is a common understanding across clients, agencies, and academics of what it is and how it works. Misunderstandings can create barriers to full implementation, and it is the responsibility of the industry as a whole to address this and enable meaningful dialogue to take place and progress to be mad

IMC: Has anything really changed? A new perspective on an old definition

Integrated marketing communication (IMC) has emerged as a new concept in marketing in the 21st century. IMC is mostly thought of, taught and written about as simply the integration of advertising and promotional activities. However, this paper proposes IMC as a broader concept. It is more than a process or activity within an organisation: it is a system of belief or engagement, embedded in an organisation's culture, underpinned by communication and driven by technology and senior management. We identify seven major tenets of the integrated view of marketing communication within the IMC literature, and argue that early marketing concepts of the 20th century are no longer valid. IMC can be seen as a new paradigm in marketing, equipped with central concepts that apply to many business environments

“IMC is dead. Long live IMC”: Academics' versus practitioners’ views

The purpose of the research is to establish whether academics and practitioners are similar in their perceptions of what Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is and what role it has to play in today’s dynamic landscape. This objective is achieved by analysing ten essays that were published by Campaign magazine in December 2010 under the heading of “What’s Next in Integration”. The essays were written by a selection of successful and high profile practitioners and it was therefore felt to be an accurate description of views of the industry on the subject. The essays are analysed utilising a framework provided by Kliatchko (2008) with reference to other key writers in the field. The implications of the findings are then discusse