Marketing Management, 16th Edition

Managing Integrated Marketing Communications

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is an approach to managing a communication campaign through a coordinated use of different communication tools that work in concert and reinforce one another to enable the company to achieve its strategic goals. IMC ensures that a company’s communication activities are consistent with one another and can achieve the company’s communication goals in an effective and cost-efficient manner. IMC can occur on four distinct levels: horizontal, vertical, internal, and external.

• Horizontal integration involves coordinating all relevant marketing actions—including packaging, pricing, sales promotions, and distribution—with the communication campaign to achieve maximum ...