With the challenges presented by new media, shifting media patterns, and divided consumer attention, the optimal integration of marketing communications takes on increasing importance. Drawing on a ...review of relevant academic research and guided by managerial priorities, the authors offer insights and advice as to how traditional and new media such as search, display, mobile, TV, and social media interact to affect consumer decision making. With an enhanced understanding of the consumer decision journey and how consumers process communications, the authors outline a comprehensive framework featuring two models designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of integrated marketing communication programs: a "bottom-up" communications matching model and a "top-down" communications optimization model. The authors conclude by suggesting important future research priorities.
•We compare the impact of multiple touchpoints on consideration in four categories.•Respondents report on six touchpoints using the real-time experience tracking method.•Touchpoint positivity and not ...just touchpoint frequency influences consideration.•In-store communications positivity is more influential than that of ads, WOM or PR.•Peer observation, a hardly studied touchpoint, is both pervasive and persuasive.
Marketers face the challenge of resource allocation across a range of touchpoints. Hence understanding their relative impact is important, but previous research tends to examine brand advertising, retailer touchpoints, word-of-mouth, and traditional earned touchpoints separately. This article presents an approach to understanding the relative impact of multiple touchpoints. It exemplifies this approach with six touchpoint types: brand advertising, retailer advertising, in-store communications, word-of-mouth, peer observation (seeing other customers), and traditional earned media such as editorial. Using the real-time experience tracking (RET) method by which respondents report on touchpoints by contemporaneous text message, the impact of touchpoints on change in brand consideration is studied in four consumer categories: electrical goods, technology products, mobile handsets, and soft drinks. Both touchpoint frequency and touchpoint positivity, the valence of the customer's affective response to the touchpoint, are modeled. While relative touchpoint effects vary somewhat by category, a pooled model suggests the positivity of in-store communication is in general more influential than that of other touchpoints including brand advertising. An almost entirely neglected touchpoint, peer observation, is consistently significant. Overall, findings evidence the relative impact of retailers, social effects and third party endorsement in addition to brand advertising. Touchpoint positivity adds explanatory power to the prediction of change in consideration as compared with touchpoint frequency alone. This suggests the importance of methods that track touchpoint perceptual response as well as frequency, to complement current analytic approaches such as media mix modeling based on media spend or exposure alone.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) plays a key role in current marketing communications landscape and further empirical research is called for to examine customer perceived IMC. To fill this ...gap, this paper examines how customers perceive the IMC of two global brands (Coke and Pepsi). The aim is to shed light on the relationship between customer characteristics and the perceived level of marketing integration. Finite mixture models were applied to analyze the data and three types of customers were identified: 'friends', 'strangers', and 'flighty'. For both brands, consumers in the 'flighty' segment have the highest level of customer perceived IMC, which might be owed to this segment's exposure to a wider variety of media and communication messages. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.
Purpose
This conceptual paper aims at developing a customer-centric marketing communications approach that takes the starting point in the customer ecosystem.
Design/methodology/approach
After a ...critical analysis of existing marketing communications and integrated marketing communication (IMC) approaches, a customer-driven view of marketing communications is developed using recent developments in relationship communication, customer-dominant logic and the notion of customer value formation as value-in-use.
Findings
A customer-integrated marketing communication (CIMC) approach centred on a communication-in-use concept is conceptually developed and introduced. The analysis results in a CIMC model, where a customer in his or her individual ecosystem, based on integration of a set of messages from different sources, makes sense of the many messages he or she is exposed to.
Research limitations/implications
The paper presents a customer-driven perspective on marketing communication and IMC. The analysis is conceptual and should trigger future empirical grounding. It indicates the need for a change in mindset in research.
Practical implications
CIMC requires a turnaround in the mindset that steers how companies and their marketers communicate with customers. The CIMC model provides guidelines for planning marketing communication.
Originality/value
The customer-driven communication-in-use concept and the CIMC model challenge traditional inside-out approaches to planning and implementing marketing communication.
Xi’an is among the ancient Chinese cities with rich culture and geographical sites. Technological development promises Xi’an a significant breakthrough in communicating the unique traits of a fact ...that boosts revenues from urban tourism. Most research on marketing strategy focuses on the impacts of an advertisement on brand reputation but does not narrow it down to a specific marketing strategy. The research reports the finding of meta-analysis and case studies whose focus is to determine how the network media and new media have contributed to Xi’an’s tourism by spreading a positive image of the city. The research proposed that integrated marketing on new media presents business entities as a platform for developing the required brand awareness. The findings of this research indicated that Integrated marketing on new media is the future of marketing since it incorporates various media forms in one platform. Even though new media bears some setbacks on the tourism docket, the benefits associated with integrated marketing promotion in the new media have boosted Xi’an’s tourism industry, as evident in the upsurge of tourists from 2018 to date.
Aims and Introduction. In the period of communication, future's communication, communication policies and planning have a special necessity; Because they are necessary to achieve and maintain a ...competitive advantages. In practice, an organization's communication with a particular product can occur in four general ways: in-house communication, ex-organizational communication with suppliers, ex-organizational communication with customers, and ex-organizational communication with other stakeholders. These connections must be planned and implemented in a way that strengthens the image and brand of the organization and the product. Insufficient ability of companies to communicate seamlessly with the internal and external environment leads to loss of opportunities and loss of competitiveness. With the advent of e-commerce, the fourth wave created the motivation to move from accessing customer summary information (to clarify the basic patterns in the second wave) to acquiring and working with customer information. This strategy developed relationships with individual customers and raised the need to pay more attention to marketing integration. Thus, the term IMC was extended to integrated marketing. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to identify and design a basic integrated marketing pattern.Methodology. This study, with a pragmatic philosophical approach, surveyes the evolution of integrated marketing through a gradual process and seeks to know what integrated marketing patterns are and what practical effects and results these patterns can have. Considering Hunt's three-pronged pattern, integrated marketing and its basic concepts, namely marketing communications and integrated marketing communications (both at the micro levels of the marketing domain and the sum of the elements of the marketing mix and at the macro levels of the organization), even occasionally, recommended in the for-profit sector of small companies, market corners, and service organizations, as well as in the non-profit sector.In terms of the nature of research data, the need to study the definitions and descriptions in the disciplines and scientific concepts of communication, marketing, organizational communication, managerial communication, marketing communication, management of marketing communication tools, integrated communication, integrated marketing communication, integrated brand communication, communication and public relations management so that it can achieve a common language of integration approach. This research tends more towards qualitative exploratory research. Regarding the degree of coordination between the content of the measurement tool and the purpose of the research, the validity of the content was also examined using the opinion of experts. To evaluate the content validity of the obtained codes quantitatively, two relative content validity coefficients (CVR) of Lawshe and content validity index (CVI) of Waltz and Basel are used.Findings. Content analysis of 46 integrated marketing definitions and similar concepts performed using content analysis method. In order to examine the validity of codings, the opinions and suggestions of five experts familiar with the concepts of coding and marketing communications used. The relative validity coefficient of the core and selective content codes was 0.99, which indicates sufficient validity of the codes. Content validity index of core and selective codes were 0.93 and 0.88, respectively. The consensus of experts on the validity of pivotal and selective codings and the lack of code changes in revisions performed over a period of one month indicates the stability, representation, and accuracy of the codes and thus the reliability of the results. One of the research findings is the identification of three basic patterns of integrated marketing: thinking, speech and behavior. These three basic patterns used to design the core of an integrated marketing model. Identifying and designing an integrated marketing model can provide the necessary basis for presenting an integrated marketing theory.Discussion and results. Integrated marketing has emerged as a natural evolutionary process in marketing communications that has undergone fundamental changes in at least three main areas: markets, media and communications, and consumers. These changes have taken place primarily with advances in information technology and have led to a major shift from product-centric mass marketing theories in the 1950s and 1960s to more customer-oriented, interactive, and measurable databases. Is. But integrated marketing shows that there is a need for more accurate identification of patterns associated with this phenomenon.The basic model of integrated marketing can combine the concept and process of integrated marketing with more coherence and form the basis of theorizing in this field in different frameworks.As marketing enters a new era in which consumers determine when, where, and how to use media, marketing needs to adapt and change. In the new marketing renaissance, when and where do customers and stakeholders want to hear it? Therefore, marketers must first understand the customer and then develop interdisciplinary plans to get the best customers at the time and place where the brands and messages are most appropriate to build long-term profitable relationships and build customer trust. Get and keep. The organization with long-term and strategic planning of its communications and by integrating the communications process in the environment inside and outside its borders must create and transfer values, production and innovation in any type of products, speech and behavior before performing any communication activities. Coordinate and make a sound to increase the level of trust and confidence in the organization in the business environment through interaction with stakeholders.The core of integrated marketing lies in the principles of developing customer-oriented and data-driven communication programs. The strategic advantage of transferring consumer data to customer applied knowledge requires an understanding of what the data represents and how the database managed as a strategic communication tool. Using the proposed model (thinking, speech, and behavior), the organization expected to be able to solve these problems by adopting a knowledge-based market-based approach: 1) know itself well, 2) identify all its communication channels 3) Identify the reasons for its relationship and its levels (who and why?), 4) identify its audience and stakeholders (for whom); 5) Specify its direct and clear content and message (what); 6) Define his / her communication tools accurately (how); And finally 7) follow up and analyze the message sent and the results obtained (feedback).
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) process is considered a way to develop a long-term relationship with the organization's stakeholders and increase its results, besides that, there is still ...not a clear understanding of factors that have a positive influence on it. As a strategic process that involves the whole organization we believe that strategic orientations can either act as drivers or impediments of this process, specifically, we test the influence of Innovation Orientation (OI) in that process and find out that it be a driver of such process, we also confirm the positive influence of the IMC process in the marketing performance. To do so, we conducted a survey with 250 SMEs of the hospitality sector. Our study contributes both to the IMC and OI literature once that it provides evidence that IMC can be an important tool to help managers to increase marketing performance and that OI can influence process beyond those directly related to innovations, by doing so we broaden the scope of IO and increase the importance of IMC showing that managers can influence their company's culture towards innovativeness to improve their communication process and in this way achieve greater marketing results.
This paper analyses integrated marketing communications (IMC) research from its inception in 1991, up to 2012 (included). A bibliometric approach has been applied for the first time to detect and ...visualize conceptual sub-domains and identify the most salient themes within IMC research via combining co-word analysis and science mapping. The quantitative analysis of a corpus of IMC manuscripts contributes to complement the previous qualitative reviews by using the Wakita and Tsurumi agglomeration algorithm and two-dimensional graphs. The results enable the authors to provide a structure for the conceptual sub-domains, classification of the themes showing internal associations into four groups, and identification of the main research trends. This paper seeks to respond to the calls for greater theoretical clarification of the IMC discipline providing a snapshot of the thematic evolution of IMC research over time enabling researchers to better understand the current state of the art and suggesting future research directions.
Much organisational development occurs during times of crisis when answers and solutions are urgently needed. The objective of this article is to show examples illustrating that organisational ...listening on social media may take leaps from immature to mature mainly due to the pressure from stakeholders, not often as a strategic tool of integrated marketing communications (IMC) or public communications. The first example is from the late 2010s, when stakeholders were introduced to a direct route to brands made available through social media. Many unanswered customer questions suddenly became visible and were subsequently addressed. Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic, as the second example, pressured organisations to respond to citizens' urgent concerns. These snapshots of development suggest that what matters for organisational legitimacy is understanding stakeholders' changing needs. This paper proposes that organisational listening - even in social media - should become a strategic function of organisations. Building on theories related to organisational listening, social media and IMC, this article argues for incorporating organisational listening as a strategic function into a model of integrated marketing and communications and/or strategic public communication.
The study investigates the role of integrated marketing communications (IMC) and its effect on brand equity (BE) and business performance (BP) in Ghana's microfinance institutions (MFIs). A total of ...407 key staff of MFIs were surveyed using a questionnaire. Purposive sampling technique was employed to select respondents. Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used to test the hypothesised relationships between the constructs in the study. The results indicate a significant positive relationship between IMC and BE on one hand; IMC and BP on the other; and BE and BP. Finally, the study found that BE mediates the relationship between IMC and BP. The study provides a useful guide to strategy in marketing communications by delineating the crucial role that IMC plays in brand performance.
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