What is IMC?

There are many aspects of marketing such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing. Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) states that you can achieve a greater impact by coordinating all those marketing aspects than permitting each to work by itself. In other words, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

What are the main barriers to the adoption of IMC?

Although IMC can dramatically improve communication effectiveness and impact implementing the IMC process in an organization is not an easy task. Though the awareness about IMC is on the rise, implementation has been slow. The following “barriers’ are some of the reasons why the implementation has been low:

1. Top Management Support (lack of). Without top management support, it’s hard for any plan or project to be successful. Some of the managers still think that the marketing budget gets diluted and effectiveness suffers if multiple tools are employed or even fail to see that they can reach the target audience via multiple media channels (not just the traditional ones).
2. Accurate Metrics (lack of). As long as there will not be accurate metrics to measure marketing productivity, marketing expenditures in general will be seen by some CEOs as an expense that can be easily cut. It’s even harder to measure the actual impact of a specific channel as part of the overall impact.
3. Manpower (lack of). Small businesses do not usually have the manpower with cross-disciplinary skills to integrate their marketing communications. The implementation requires proper planning, redefining the scope of marketing communication, application of information technology and financial and strategic integration.
4. Changes needed in the organization. To implement the IMC process effectively, a company needs to follow certain guidelines. It should adopt a flexible organizational structure and change the mindset of the employees. It should adopt a customer centric strategy to design communication campaigns from the consumer perspective. A collaborative strategy is needed, that enables coordination and cooperation between various departments in the organization. This is sometimes easier said then done as rigid organizational structures (silos) are often “infested” with managers who protect both their budgets and their power base.
5. Theoretical and practical foundations (lack of). Although there is a lot of information about IMC in general and IMC tools in particular, there is still not a “standard procedure” that can be followed. What should a truly integrated marketing department look like? Should the PR department report to Marketing? Also, no more wild and wacky sales promotions unless they fit into the overall marketing communications strategy and so on. The practical aspects are still to be defined.

Most of the barriers that relate to HR and organizational changes can be overcome by training the staff. There is an innate resistance to change in people but with proper change management, the anxiety and fear of change can be put aside. The lack of accurate metrics however, can not be easily overcome as getting accurate information is usually expensive and sometime not even available.