One way to enhance marketing effectiveness is to make use of integrated marketing communications (IMC). A fancy term - and even more important sounding acronym - for a simple and quite obvious premise of applying a relevant selection of multiple marketing and communication strategies to get the best results, i.e. attract attention, create awareness, generate interest, persuade, establish confidence and stimulate action.
According to Desiree Gullan, Creative Director of South Africa's Guerrilla Marketing, “With the fragmentation of media choices, shifting media consumption habits and greater focus on accountability of marketing spend, marketers involved in all sectors should orchestrate integrated marketing programs. Using a multi-disciplined approach specifically designed by us, we've been encouraging our clients to look at their communications in an integrated manner for the past three years. And the results speak for themselves.”
Put 100 marketers in a room and ask them what their definition of integrated marketing is and you'll get 100 answers. At Gullan's company, IMC means fusing appropriate marketing and communication disciplines together to ensure the ultimate interference. Unlike some marketing professionals who divide the various disciplines into separate groups - that rarely come together to communicate one synergistic message. “Our approach means we make every outgoing message consistent with the objective but true and relevant to the experience of the medium. The result is marketing comms repeated in creative ways across a variety of mediums so that at the end of a campaign our client's selling messages are understood and assimilated into their target market's lives,” says Gullan.
The evolving landscape of advertising and media have been the root cause of the shift to IMC in the following ways,
• From media advertising to multiple forms of communication
• From mass media to more specialised, focussed media relevant to target audiences
• From general-focus advertising and marketing to data-based marketing
• From low agency accountability to high agency accountability
• From traditional compensation to performance-based compensation
• From limited Internet access to widespread availability.
“The key to creating cohesion with your marketing messages is in facilitating a dialogue between yourself (the brand custodian) and your prospective consumers. It's not one specific marketing campaign or press release. Rather, it's how the blending and execution of various marketing disciplines convey a message synergistically, and at every possible customer touch point,” concludes Gullan.
