From the editor.

In creating this special issue, we have tried to fill a long-felt need for greater theoretical development in integrated marketing communication (IMC), as well as for demonstration of its practical applications. The major criterion used by the three coeditors for evaluating submissions, therefore,

The advertising community should find these papers to be of value as they address critical industry concerns such as the creation of brand identity and equity, generation of message synergy, legal issues associated with IMC, and measurement of IMC performance.

Each of the coeditors has written a brief introductory note for the issue as well. Tom Duncan discusses industry's adoption of IMC, Don Schultz talks about future research needs for IMC, and Chuck Patti presents his views on IMC education. I am excited about sharing these views, and the views of all of the authors in the special issue; after reading these provocative pieces, I am certain that you will be equally as excited.

Russell N. Laczniak, Editor

Iowa State University

IMC IN INDUSTRY: MORE TALK THAN WALK

To better understand industry thinking and adoption of IMC, we need to first clarify the IMC concept and process. Initially, IMC was about ensuring that all marketing communication messages had one voice, one look. It was soon discovered, however, that to accomplish this executional objective while managing and leveraging the new communication technologies, a new set of marketing principles and practices was required that would support an ongoing, interactive, cross-functional process for managing brands. The following list of IMC principles and practices was created by a group of IMC academics and professionals, and originally appeared in a White Paper on the Status, Scope, and Future of IMC, coedited by Tom Duncan and Frank Mulhern (2004).

Principles

* All customer touch points impact the brand and brand equity, not just advertising and promotional messages.

* Interactive, two-way communication is just as important as one-way mass media messages.

* Transactions are "relationship" building blocks--each transaction strengthens or weakens a customer-brand relationship.

* Retaining and growing customers is just as important, if not more so, than acquiring customers.

* IMC is an ongoing, interactive process.

Practices

* Communications and strategies are customer focused (based on "outside-in" thinking).

* There is cross-functional planning and monitoring of all brand messages.

* Customer expectations, not customers, are managed.

* All marketing communication (MC) messages have strategic consistency.

* Brand positioning is integrated into all brand messages.

* MC planning is based on prioritized SWOTs (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).

* Segmenting and targeting are database driven.

* Relationship metrics and other financial measurements are used to evaluate MC programs.

It's hard to find an agency or client marketing executive who doesn't believe in the IMC concept. Also, nearly all agree that they should be implementing the above principles and practices. At the same time, however, most admit that their companies/agencies struggle to apply many of these principles and practices. This is because there continue to be several barriers to applying IMC.

Probably the most serious problem is that many managers don't really understand the IMC process (they still think it is having all MC messages sound and look alike). Second, integration is so complex that its cost-benefit has been difficult to prove. A third issue is the lack of creativity to incorporate brand building into promotional efforts. And fourth is the failure to change compensation systems to reward relationship building and an increase in brand equity (both consumer-and corporate-based).

The billions invested in customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the last decade are testimony to the desire companies have to find better ways to interact with customers and build the relationships that build brands. Unfortunately, because CRM systems have been driven by hardware and software companies, the communication dimension has been missing and the majority of CRM initiatives have been considered failures. CRM's unfortunate history has probably hurt investment in IMC, which is ironic because IMC is a process that not only incorporates the data-driven qualities of CRM, but also has a strong focus on interactive communication--adding the human dimension to CRM. In addition, IMC is designed to manage customers' expectations, not the customers themselves. (What customers in their right minds would want to be managed by a company?)

Despite CRM failures and the lack of IMC understanding, metrics, and proper reward systems, the outlook for IMC adoption is extremely positive. The reasons for this are many. Following are examples of major marketing and branding issues that the above IMC principles and practices are designed to address:

* Message clutter and brand proliferation demand a marketing communication system that breaks through this clutter. Great creative (as rare as it is) is no longer enough. Brand messages must be strategically consistent and new communication technologies must be used to facilitate interactions with customers and prospects. Timothy Dewhirst and Brad Davis's paper shows how Player's cigarettes has achieved strategic consistency.

* The value of brand equity has become a boardroom critical issue. This was in part brought about by the increased rate of mergers and acquisitions over the last decade. Board members and C-level executives have come to realize that a major portion of shareholder value is intangible--what we refer to as brand equity--and therefore must be better managed. That is why ad agencies, identity firms, brand consultancies, and even traditional management consulting firms are making "brands" and "brand building" a major focus of their business offerings. Providing some good insight into this issue is the paper by Mike Reid, Sandra Luxton, and Felix Mavondo, which examines how IMC relates to a brand orientation and a market orientation.

* With over three-fourths of GDP (gross domestic product) generated by services, the concepts of customer service and interactivity are receiving much greater attention. This focus on customers and interactivity even goes beyond service products. In The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, and Directions (M.E. Sharpe, 2006, forthcoming), Robert Lusch and Stephen Vargo argue that value is cocreated in service experiences and relationships through the sharing of resources, including skills and knowledge, and after the sale, through the use of goods and services produced. What this means is that the service experience is dominant whether a company is selling goods or services.

* With increasing pressure on profits, the need for accountability has never been greater. IMC should be driven by relationship and brand metrics. This issue is addressed by Janek Ratnatunga and Michael T. Ewing in their paper, which presents a Brand Capability Value model. It is also addressed by Mike Reid's paper, which examines the relationship between the IMC process and brand outcomes.

* Because brands live in the heads and hearts of customers and all other stakeholders, all brand contacts impact the brand, not just marketing communication messages. IMC provides a way to identify and prioritize brand contact points to ensure company resources are used where they can generate the greatest synergy and ROI (return on investment). The paper by Claire A. Stammerjohan, Charles M. Wood, Yuhmiin Chang, and Esther Thorson examines the interaction of publicity, advertising, and previous brand perceptions.

* Brand trust and credibility is constantly being threatened by the likes of Enron, Arthur Anderson, AIG, Tyco, WorldCom, and Adelphia corporate scandals, along with media credibility issues such as the Dan Rather/ CBS scandal and Jayson Blair's fake stories in the New York Times. These situations have thrown a shadow over all big businesses, which makes it even more difficult to create brand trust. IMC's use of interactivity and customer feedback data can help counter consumer skepticism. Kathy Fitzpatrick's paper discusses some of the legal challenges that IMC faces as it goes about making promises and claims. In the paper by Michael B. Beverland and Sandra Luxton, the authors discuss the issue of "strategic decoupling" and how it impacts brand credibility.

Companies and agencies that recognize that everything a company does (and sometimes what it doesn't do) can send powerful brand messages should also recognize the value of investing in IMC. This is because IMC is an ongoing, interactive, cross-functional process of brand communication planning, execution, and evaluation designed to strengthen the relationships that build brands and increase brand equity.

Tom Duncan, Special Issue Editor

University of Denver

IMC RESEARCH MUST FOCUS MORE ON OUTCOMES

The eight papers in this special issue have expanded the research arena for IMC substantially. From the legal implications of IMC development to an extensive case history of IMC in action to a new model of how an IMC process might be developed, all have extended and enhanced our view of how IMC might be theorized, studied, understood, and implemented. The authors, ranging from Canada to Australia to the United States, demonstrate that IMC is not geographically bound but is truly a concept that crosses boundaries both physical and intellectual. Best of all, many of the authors are new to IMC; perhaps that is what enabled them to develop the new and exciting concepts you will find in the following pages.

So, what have we really learned about IMC research from this project? Four things are apparent.

1. IMC research is still in the developmental stage. Many of the papers submitted attempted to use or implement traditional advertising, with communication analytical research techniques and approaches. In some instances, they worked, but in too many cases, they didn't. Thus, the papers could not be accepted. Clearly, IMC demands a new set of research tools, ones that focus on identifying the interactions that IMC creates. The traditional research approaches we have used in the functional areas of advertising, public relations, direct marketing, and the like simply aren't adequate or up to the task of providing an understanding of IMC--how it works, how it impacts the various parties, and how it can be developed and maintained. We need new tools. Some are presented in this issue. Others still need to be developed.

2. Consumers and stakeholders should be the IMC research focus. Too much of our existing research seems to focus on "how to do IMC" from a marketer's view. That seems to leave out the important questions about results and outcomes. Doing IMC is fine, but there are few rewards for "doing IMC." The real question is what do consumers or customers or users get from IMC. That seems to be the area where our research focus is lacking. Maybe we should start with consumers or customers and work back through the IMC process or approach, rather than starting with how and in what way we want to develop integrated programs.

3. Synergy is the primary research task. Clearly, from these papers and the others submitted, IMC is about synergy, but synergy in a much expanded range than first proposed by the founding authors. Synergy today means how various marketing and communication activities interact with each other in the marketplace and how the various brand "touchpoints" come together to impact and influence consumers, customers, employees, channels, the financial community, and the host of other stakeholders that are involved in today's marketplace success. We have few tools to measure interaction, and even fewer to try to parse out the impact and effects of combinations of marketing communication programs. Most of all, when we do integrate marketing communication programs, are the results obtained additive, multiplicative, or even in some cases, detrimental? Those questions seem to be at the heart of any type of ongoing IMC research.

4. Long-term not short-term effects and impact. In too many cases, we seem to be trying to research and measure the short-term impact of IMC programs. What if the real value of IMC is over the longer term, such as is the case with brands? How can we develop ongoing, longitudinal measures of the impact and effects of IMC if that is the case? We've had little success measuring the long-term effects of advertising. Can we do better with IMC?

At the heart of IMC research is a better understanding of how--and in what way the combining, aligning, and integrating of marketing communication improves or enhances current marketing communication approaches. This special issue is a great start to creating a new path of IMC research based on a new set of researchers and scholars. To me, the output of the efforts was a resounding success. We hope you agree when you read the papers that follow.

Don Schultz, Special Issue Editor

Northwestern University

IMC: A NEW DISCIPLINE WITH AN OLD LEARNING APPROACH

One of the desired benefits of this special issue was to improve the learning and teaching of IMC. We certainly know that marketing communication has changed significantly in both theory development and practice over the past decade. The above comments by Don Schultz and Tom Duncan inform us of the breadth and depth of those changes. But as we prepare students to be IMC practitioners and researchers, how well do our curricula reflect what we believe are the most important dimensions of IMC? Is what we teach truly reflective of the state of IMC's ongoing development as a discipline? Are we teaching industry best practices? Are we encouraging research within the most important IMC topics? Unfortunately, we seem to have a new (or at least an emerging) discipline with an old learning approach.

Here are the challenges and the opportunities for us. Some of the following comments are based on a multicountry study about a variety of learning and teaching issues within IMC. Some of the results of that study were presented and discussed at the Third Asia-Pacific Conference of the American Academy of Advertising (Hong Kong, June 1-4, 2005).

1. Need for an Integrated, Interdisciplinary Approach

IMC courses, research projects, and journal submissions primarily emerge from faculty in marketing departments in business schools. On the surface, this is logical enough. After all, IMC clearly indicates a marketing focus. However, if we want learners to grasp the research issues and industry issues outlined above, we clearly need to find ways to bring together the discipline knowledge of the social and behavioral sciences with marketing and business. In addition, while interdisciplinary learning is taking place in some universities, it's primarily a case of too little and very late. One wonders what happens to all of the talk about interdisciplinary teaching, multidisciplinary collaborations on research projects, and jointly sponsored academic programs. We're all very much aware of university administrative barriers that sometimes exist, but in the end, it's really a case of our own personal motivation, commitment, and determination.

What can we do? If you can't create formal linkages across disciplines, create informal collaborations on an individual- or small-group basis. Many years ago when I was chairing the marketing department at the University of Denver, we created a graduate degree in advertising management. This started with an idea and informal conversations with my counterpart in the mass communication department. We have a similar program at Queensland University of Technology, through the School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations and the Faculty of Creative Industries. Others exist in the United States and in various other parts of the world. We believe this type of collaboration is absolutely essential if we are going to provide the very best learning outcomes for our students.

2. Need for Learning Materials That Lead Students to the Future

The origins of IMC reside in the notions of the promotion element within the marketing mix, first put forth by Neil H. Borden with The Economic Effects of Advertising (Chicago: Richard D. Irwin, 1942), and then later by E. Jerome McCarthy with Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, 1960); however, its evolution from promotion management to IMC started just over a decade ago with The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications by Don Schultz, Stanley Tannenbaum, and Robert E Lauterborn (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, 1993). Since the publication of the book by Schultz, Tannenbaum, and Lauterborn, there have been dozens of articles about the nature of IMC, its definition and constructs, and its applications. Indeed, many of the papers submitted to this special issue focused on those areas. Today, most university-level marketing programs offer a course in IMC or its predecessor, promotion management. The problem is that the primary learning materials (textbooks) that are used in the teaching of IMC are primarily grounded in either promotion management or advertising. There is precious little content about the issues of the developmental status of IMC as a discipline; the need to focus on consumers and stakeholders; the importance of synergy; short- and long-term effects and measurement; cross-functional organizational structures; brand value; brand trust and credibility, and so forth. Indeed, if we closely scrutinize the content of IMC syllabi--and this is just one of the tasks undertaken in the research project mentioned above--we find that, as educators, we have much to do to bring our students to the level of understanding of where IMC is and where it is going.

Two solutions to this issue come to mind. First, we all need to acknowledge that IMC is an emerging discipline. This means that definitions and constructs are under development, and within this development, new research issues will emerge. We hope that the papers in this special issue will help inform educators, students, and practitioners about where IMC is today and where it is going in the near future. Second, we need to make the effort to bring current thinking about IMC to our students. Fortunately, technology facilitates the creation of customized texts and readings, thus allowing each of us to help our students understand IMC from its own foundation, not as a superficial extension of promotion management or advertising.

3. Need for Commitment to Push IMC's Development

If we look at the papers in this special issue--along with an analysis of the 100+ articles on IMC that have been published over the past ten years--we could conclude that the following seven areas comprise our current thinking about IMC: brand equity, strategic integration, message integration, multiple audiences, managing contact points, database communication, relationship building, and synergy. There is an endless research (and teaching) agenda just within these areas, including the understanding, refining, and testing of their application, isolating their effects, and confirming their validity. How much of our time is devoted to advancing this emerging discipline versus teaching old concepts dressed up with new terminology? The challenge for educators is to join in the development of IMC.

The solutions to this issue are obvious enough. First, become engaged in the debate about what IMC is, where it is going, and how it can best reach its destination. As we all know, there is no shortage of opportunities to become engaged. This special issue is just one current example. Second, challenge your students and the industry to challenge IMC definitions, concepts, and processes.

One of the most exciting aspects about working in IMC is that there is so much yet to discover. This "early days" status of IMC should encourage us to reexamine what we are teaching, how we are teaching, and how we are preparing our students for productive and satisfying careers. None of the papers in this special issue directly addresses these topics; however, as you read each paper, I hope your teaching perspective grows as much as ours has.

Charles Patti, Special Issue Editor

Queensland University of Technology,

Brisbane, QLD, Australia