Although the idea of integrating solutions to marketing communication challenges has been around for some 30 years – reaching back to Young & Rubicam’s ‘whole egg’ concept – it was not until a 1991 study by Clarke Caywood and Donald Schultz of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism that a formal theory appeared under the banner Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC).

Heralded as the new marketing paradigm and marketing’s next big idea, IMC was portrayed as an unstoppable movement that would force us to reconsider all our previous approaches to marketing communications. A decade later, it seems clear that IMC has not fulfilled its potential.

So what’s gone wrong?

On March 25-26, a symposium on IMC was held at the University of Denver to discuss this question. I was the lone Canadian attendee among 19 representatives of industry, academics and consulting including Clarke Caywood, Robert Lauterborn (credited with writing the first book on IMC in 1991) and Tom Duncan (chair of the American Marketing Association’s IMC Special Interest Group).

We talked about why IMC hasn’t accomplished the transformation of the marketing communications industry that many thought it would and asked, ‘Where do we go from here?’

At a time when audiences have fragmented, new media has proliferated and databases have grown dramatically in size and detail, the need for integrating tools to achieve strategic consistency has never been greater. Yet, IMC has been relegated to a tactical co-ordinating process erroneously over-simplified to ‘one-sight one-sound.’ Why?

We found the first problem to be with the term itself. ‘Integration’ is an important reference to the task of co-ordinating all of a brand’s communications, and points at the need for cross-functional teams. ‘Communications’ is the core of the concept. Managers must be sensitive to the fact that everything an organization does – across all departments and divisions – sends messages to consumers and other stakeholder groups.

The concern lay with the word ‘marketing.’ By referring to ‘marketing’ communications, the impression has been given that it is only about co-ordinating messages across advertising, PR, promotions and other communication vehicles. (Although, unfortunately, even this modest degree of integration appears rare.)

In fact, IMC points out that consumers instinctively integrate all messages coming from an organization: advertising, personal experiences, media stories, treatment by customer complaint departments, product assembly instructions, executive speeches, labour practices and disputes, Web site design, billing procedures, product performance… It is important for managers to be sensitive to the communication content of all organizational activities and ensure strategic consistency. This scope has been lost in the current approach to IMC.

If we drop the ‘M’ what would be a better term? The leading candidate was Integrated Brand Communications. We believed IBC better captured the scope and strategic nature of the original concept. The dilemma, of course, is with the countless textbooks, business cards and corporate logos that would have to be changed. IMC has developed a strong brand awareness, although its positioning was not what was originally intended.

A second reason for our failure to convince managers to adopt an IMC approach was the failure to clearly demonstrate the reward. Why should managers assume the onus and risks of restructuring their organizations to support an integrated communications approach? How can they measure the impact of message consistency? What case studies can we point to and say, here are examples of the cost savings possible and/or the greater results achievable? Is an integrated approach more suitable to certain product categories, communication tasks and/or audiences? We haven’t provided effective answers to these questions.

Finally, we noted that very little guidance was given to managers on how to implement an integrated communications approach. Cross-functional teams are essential, but where do you begin? What changes to your compensation system are necessary to support integration? Who will supervise the integrated structure?

We are currently developing a symposium position paper to address these concerns. The paper will summarize the discussions that took place under three headings:

* How do we make IMC (or IBC) more strategic and move beyond the executional level?

* How can the value of IMC be empirically measured?

* What should the IMC process and organizational structure be?

This position paper is intended to stimulate research in the key areas that have been impeding the growth of integrated communications. It is also the first step in attempting to bring some consistency and quality control to the field – the first salvo against the misinterpretations and misrepresentations of IMC that have contributed to its failure to live up to its potential.

Dr. Brad Davis is an associate professor of marketing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont. He can be reached at bdavis@wlu.ca.