Integrated Marketing vs. Integrated Marketing Communication by Abhijeet Mishra

As MBA students we are generally taught ‘Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)’ in our respective colleges but there is another concept which has been there for years but its importance has been realized lately and it is known as ‘Integrated Marketing (IM)’. Now looking at Integrated Marketing one might confuse it with ‘Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)’ but there are subtle differences between the two. Integrated Marketing Communication is a concept of marketing communication planning that recognizes the added value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communication disciplines – general advertising, direct response, sales promotion, public relations – and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communication impact. It deals with integrating different communication mediums so that the brand message remains consistent across different media and the media planning is done in such a way that the different mediums complement each other. IMC is based on the concept that every medium has its strengths and that strength must be utilized cleverly. For e.g. TV is the best medium when it comes to communicating the emotional content of the brand and print is best at creating knowledge about the brand. A TV commercial (TVC) cant be converted into a print or a OOH but the print must be designed in such a manner that it complements the TVC. This leads the target audience to be exposed to various communication media each of which reflects the brand values or strengthens the brand equity. So overall IMC can lead to optimal spends and with proper media-neutral planning, can provide a bigger impact.

When it comes to Integrated Marketing it is a much holistic discipline of which IMC is a subset. An Integrated Marketing campaign requires and generally consists of an IMC plan. Integrated Marketing is generally adopted to answer a marketing objective and executing a marketing strategy whereas IMC deals with the communication part of the campaign and has the objective of communicating the brand value and the essence of the campaign in an efficient manner using different medium. The main objective of Integrated Marketing is that apart from communication it also integrates various other marketing disciplines so that whatever the brand does be it sponsoring an event or going for experiential marketing it must reflect the values that the brand stands for. Integrated marketing not only deals with external marketing where it deals with customers but also deals with internal marketing where the employees need to be communicated about the brand values. If a brand like Coca Cola stands for spreading happiness, whatever it does must reflect it be it the happiness vending machine, happiness truck, Coke studio, and  the people working for Coca Cola brand must also believe in the fact that coca cola stands for spreading happiness.This is the real achievement of Integrated Marketing and the brand must do something to promote this feeling within its employees as well. If a company stands for providing superior services ,then the way it selects its employees also comes under the scanner and the way it selects those people who will provide the service also reflects how serious the brand is about its promises which in turn will transcend to the consumers and will create huge brand equity. So in simpler terms we can say Integrated Marketing means integrating all the marketing tools , processes , discipline the brand is using so that all of them collectively communicate the same brand values in a different manner and complement each other so as to create a long lasting impact on the consumers along with better brand recall and loyalty.