Relationship to Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

As a marketing strategy, Integrated Marketing is closely related to and inter-dependent with Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). Indeed, many observers use the term integrated marketing when they probably mean integrated marketing communications. Whereas IMC aims to ensure consistency of message and the complementary use of media, integrated marketing is concerned with the alignment and focus of the whole organisation.

Schultz and Kitchen (2000) identified four stages of IMC concluding with an integrated value-based model. According to this interpretation, as the organisation becomes more committed to achieving consistency and differentiation across all customer contact points the business management challenge moves from marketing and marketing communication to the whole organisation, requiring a cultural and systemic infrastructure for integration. This in turn calls on new practices and higher-order levels of organisation management. For example, at this point IMC and CRM are effectively merged.

Although Schultz and Kitchen identified that whole organisation was involved at this fourth stage, they did not detail what was necessary to achieve this. In some organisations such as FMCG/packaged goods brands (e.g. chocolate, baked beans), IMC needs little more than marketing communications integration. In others, such as organisations with a high level of service content (e.g. banks, automobile firms and their dealerships, and hotel chains), the challenge becomes much more difficult. It is in this latter case that integrated marketing is most important, providing the contextual platform for stage 4 IMC, implementation of which is also one of its goals.