The definition of IMC can differ based on how your company looks at it. In most cases it is evolved by your marketing department and dictated by market segments, especially if you have to connect to multi-targets. However, most educators and professionals agree that IMC is a morphing approach to marketing that seeks to demonstrate the benefits of synchronized marketing communication across all functions of a company that affect customers. Understanding how customers perceive a company or brand and how that impacts their buying behavior is critical to planning strategic and tactical programs to increase customer loyalty, improve retention and encourage positive word of mouth. It’s also the most cost-effective way to design programs to increase awareness, interest, preference, and eventual sales to new and existing customers.
If you look at all the ways that messages can link up and put pressure on customers, you can quickly see the need for creating synergy and consistency between communication programs and contact points. IMC generally involves corporate communication, public relations, customer relations, sales promotions and employee communication functions. Each communication component, whether it is an ad, corporate social responsibility initiative, press release, e-mail, brochure or survey, must be crafted to bring in the key messages that match the target customer.
Inconsistency in messaging can result in confused customers and missed opportunities that can affect sales negatively. It’s a waste of communication resources to send an upgrade notice to someone who’s not a current customer and it can be damaging to send a promotional e-mail designed for young males to middle-aged women. These may sound like obvious problems that can be avoided, but we’ve all seen cases where we’ve been targeted incorrectly. By developing communication programs and messaging in isolation, departments run the risk of pushing away prospects and reducing satisfaction among customers.
The increasing importance of IMC is traceable to a number of marketing and technological developments. In advanced economies, traditional media have proliferated into specialized magazines, cable programming, in-transit advertisements and the Internet, thereby greatly fragmenting target audiences and placing greater demands on consumers’ attention.
In response to media proliferation, marketers are attempting to increase the impact of their communications program through an IMC framework. But the great majority of firms do not get their IMC program right, and are nowhere close to maximizing its value.
So, how can marketers best harness the multiplicity of media in the interactive, networked, global systems found in the 21st-century media marketplace? A good IMC program is critical to market success for another reason. It forms a fundamental basis for building relationships with your customers as well as your supplier chain partners. Thus, a strong IMC program lays the solid foundations needed for both Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). There are four primary stages for an IMC program from strategic research and analysis through tactical implementation.
Measuring IMC implementation is highly important, and there are available tools that can be harnessed. PR, for example can be measured via media coverage analysis, ad value equivalents, tonality of pick-ups, prominence versus competitors, and influence of spokespeople. Effectiveness of CRM programs, on the other hand, can be determined through customer satisfaction surveys, lifetime value of customer (LTV), and customer retention rates,
Marketing, sales promotion, advertising, events, direct mail and e-mail marketing can be gauged using up-selling and cross-selling revenue analysis, customer recommendations, complaints about marketing or sales programs response rates, number of inquiries, number of qualified leads from respondents, customer acquisition costs (total number of new customers vis a vis marketing costs), and increase in average sales price. Internal communication activities can be evaluated through employee surveys, and other audits like sales of companies’ products to employees, and recommendations to friends and family.
An example of such partnership is what I witnessed recently, where Kickers, a fun, playful, flexible and comfy shoe brand distributed locally by Kenrich International Distributor Corporation, sponsored an IMC Quest among IMC classes at the University of Santo Tomas. Four groups, under the UST CASA Adventure umbrella, play-acted as communication agencies to win the Kickers account. They were each given a marketing brief and from that brief, worked on what they believe should be the winning proposal.
The event uncovered exactly what is happening out in the field to students, who in turn, can echo the lessons to their peers, and more importantly, use the experience as a meaningful preparation for a real, professional IMC job. As Anthony Haber, founding chair of CASA Adventure and group account director at JWT Philippines, observed, "The Kickers competition gave the students more than just the opportunity to present. They went through the entire process of gathering and synthesizing data, understanding their target market, crafting strategy, brainstorming for creative ideas and putting elements together to form the final output. It gave them a perspective on how dynamic IMC is." Looking at the students’ output, Haber said, "The ideas were fantastic and fresh. To a certain extent, some of the ideas forwarded were even better than some of those we see in mass media today."
IMC education is a dynamic process, and it can be made even more relevant it critical partnerships between the academe and the industry based on mutual gains can be forged, and nurtured. Truly, the best way to learn IMC is via the quick application of updated theories into meaningful applications and practices.