Integrated Marketing Communications(IMC)- An Introduction with Examples

In this competitive world with innumerable marketing and advertising mediums and powerful marketing campaigns, you’ve got to communicate a consistent marketing message using a 360-degree approach to strengthen your position in the market and have an impact on your prospective as well as existing customers.

Here’s a guide on integrated marketing communication to help you move forward with this approach.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is a concept under which a company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communications channels to deliver a clear and consistent message. It aims to ensure the consistency of the message and the complementary use of media.

The IMC includes all business-to-business, channel, customer, external communications, and internal communications.

This is considered to be the 4th ‘P’ of marketing- Promotions- has metamorphosed in the past two decades to encompass a variety of activities and communication techniques. It is now termed ‘Marketing Communications’ and goes much beyond one-way communications such as advertising.

Example: In a company, there happens to be lot of communication through advertisements related to the stock market or advertisement in LinkedIn and multiple other platforms and in multiple other ways.

We also see that the marketing department does one type of communication, and the sales department in a different way, further the finance department has a different way of communication, and then the HR department and others again in a different way. So the thing is that the whole company is communicating, but not in the same way. The sole purpose of communication is to reach the target audience, but the results are not the same.

We could understand this with an example to which we could all relate ourselfs.

Example: Let’s assume that the HR department of a company says that they follow the best practices in the industry, but as a consumer, or as a candidate, you know that the salesperson of the same company does not follow any or some of the requisite practices, or may be the behaviour of that salesperson is not what the company is communicating.

So the whole concept of “IMC” talks about the communication made by the companies & we know that our customers receive communication from multiple sources, and what we need to ensure is that every department of the company speaks in a single language and the outcome of the communication is not manifold.

Reasons of using “Integrated Marketing Communication”

• There are huge amount of information that is available in the world and we as a marketer wants to ensure that whatever information the customer gets is not having any level of dissonance in it.

• Communication is very expensive.

For Example- Running a single advertisement let's assume during the SUPERBOWL event may cost for more than $1 Millions which is a huge cost to the company and affects its profits as well.

Firms all over the world demands for accountability and exactly what do we get after incurring all these costs?

There is a term called ‘ROMI’ which stands for “Return on Market Investment” and generally what happens is that we measure these costs in terms of –

• Brand & its Equity.

• Corporate Image and

• Consumer Behaviour(In terms of sales)

Also what happened earlier in the advertising industry that the companies use to send the money for the purpose and that’s it, however the situation is pretty much different with what is happening now, specially after the COVID-19.

The brands are under a lot of pressure, as the demand has vanished from the markets for each and every product, may it be the automobiles, the Real Estate, or even the apparels segment, that too in the first month of the financial year.

The net result is that spending money on advertisement in this situation will be a waste.

Example: In this current pandemic situation, television are watched for the sole purpose of watching news & in these kind of channels we see advertisements related to products such as LIFEBUOY or DETTOL, and if you have noticed then there is no such advertisements for SHOES, AUTOMOBILES etc in these channels

So, the Marketing Managers of companies has to think about these situations, as the accountability for these costs are very high for the companies. as shown in the flow chart above.