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

The Influence Scorecard and Integrated Marketing Communications

At the end of the first chapter (‘Where We Are Today’), I introduced integrated marketing communications (IMC) as the vision that describes how marketing and PR and the rest of the organization are supposed to come together. I also referred to my intention to compare our influence framework with the 2003 book by Schultz and Schultz, IMC – The Next Generation: Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns using Marketing Communications.¹²⁰ And here we are.

I’ll repeat the definition of IMC used in their book:

Integrated marketing communication is a strategic business process used to plan, develop, create, and evaluate coordinated, measurable, persuasive brand communication programs over time, with consumers, customers, prospects, and other targeted, relevant external and internal audiences.

The authors’ five-step process is:

1. Identifying customers and prospects

2. Estimating the value of customers and prospects

3. Planning communication messages and incentives

4. Estimating return on customer investment (ROCI)

5. Postprogram [sic] analysis and future planning.

The authors assert that IMC lifts ‘marcom’ activities from the tactical role to strategic management tool, and they repeatedly make the claim that the five-step process allows for clear-cut investment decisions to be made and financial returns to be calculated. Needless to say, if I thought that this was playing out repeatedly in reality, I wouldn’t ...