The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Integrated Marketing Communications

Integrated Marketing Communications: Putting it Together and Making it Work³² by Don Schultz, Stanley Tannenbaum and Robert Lauterborn, is considered to be the seminal text on the subject. The authors have this to say in the 1993 book’s introduction:

It’s a new way of looking at the whole, where once we only saw parts such as advertising, public relations, sales promotion, purchasing, employee communications, and so forth. It’s realigning communications to look at it the way the customer sees it – as a flow of information from indistinguishable sources. Professional communicators have always been condescendingly amused that consumers called everything ‘advertising’ or ‘PR’. Now they recognize with concern if not chagrin that that’s exactly the point – it is all one thing, at least to the consumer who sees or hears it.

The introduction proceeds to identify other traits of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) such as the need to elicit a response rather than just conduct a monologue, and accountability for results and outcomes, not just outputs. In particular it illuminates IMC’s dedication to identifying and calculating ROI.

Don Schultz is Professor Emeritus-in-Service of Integrated Marketing Communication at Northwestern University’s Medill School³³. The School publishes the Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), which at the time of writing defines IMC as:

… a customer-centric, data-driven method of communicating with consumers. ...