marketing64

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, and sources within a company into a seamless program, which maximizes the impact on consumers and other end users at a minimal cost. This integration affects all of a firm’s business-to-business, marketing channel, customer-focused, and internally directed communications.

1.    Information Technology

The challenge for marketers in the future is not so much related to gathering information, but rather sifting through an avalanche of statistics, ideas, and messages and putting them together in an intelligible format for company leaders to study. Technology allows instant communications between business executives and their employees, even when workers are disbursed throughout the world. Marketers can quickly determine who is buying a company’s products and identify the best communication channels to reach those customers.

2.    Changes in Channel Power
The World Wide Web and the availability of information technology have shifted more power to the consumer. Both individual customers and businesses can shop online and even place orders without ever visiting a retail store.

3.    Increase in Competition
Consumers can purchase goods and services from anyplace in the world. Competition no longer comes from the firm just down the street—it can also come from a firm 10,000 miles away or one in another country. In this type of mature market, the only way one firm can gain sales is to take customers away from another firm. Integrating advertising and other marketing communications becomes extremely important in such an environment and advertising alone is not enough to maintain sales.

4.    Brand Parity
Many products have nearly identical benefits. From the consumer’s perspective, this means shoppers will purchase from a group of accepted brands rather than one specific brand. In response, marketers must generate messages in a voice that expresses a clear difference. They must, in essence, build some type of perceived brand superiority for the company and its products or services.

5.    Integration of Information
Because consumers are able to integrate information they receive from various sources, marketers should also be concerned about integration. Every contact point should project the same message. Contact points are the places in which a customer may interact with or acquire additional information about a firm.

6.    Decline in the Effectiveness of Mass Media Advertising
VCRs and other devices make it possible to watch programmes without commercials. The rise in popularity of cable TV and satellite dishes means consumers have a wider variety of viewing choices. As a result, the number of people tuned to the major national networks has declined. IMC programmes help firms reach these harder-to-find consumers.