The Integrated Marketing Communication seeks to have all promotional and marketing activities of an organization together, project a consistent and unified image of the organization to the target market. In addition it focuses on a common goal and positioning through centralized messaging function.
It sends all customers a consistent message about the company and its brands. Therefore it enhances the image of the organization. The companies adopt integrated marketing program over the traditional method of promotion where all elements of promotion are treated separately.
IMC is an amalgamation of all marketing tools, approaches and resources within a company which maximizes impact on the consumer mind resulting in maximum profit at minimum cost.
Definition
The integrated marketing communication can be defined as under:
“A management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as – advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation. – The American marketing association.
Importance of IMC
- Awareness: Firstly, IMC tools play an important role in creating awareness of the products with respect to brand name and availability. It brings to the notice of the potential customer the new varieties of goods available in the market.
- Information: Potential customer must know about the product, features. IMC provides this information through various techniques so that the buyer can take correct decision while buying the goods.
- To increase sales. A proper communication mix tends to increase the sales of the organization. This is possible as increased sales brings economies of large scale production enables the seller to reduce cost and increase profit.
- To inform the intermediaries. IMC act as a communication channel between the sellers and the intermediaries like dealer and agents. However these intermediaries informed through sales literature, pamphlets, brochures, price list etc.
- Expansion of the market: IMC help the seller to expand the business from local level to regional level and to national level . Moreover this expansion provides his goodwill, recognition through out the country.
- More specialized media. The mass media cover any advertiser’s needs. But with ever increasing ad clutter, shorter attention spans and greater resistance to advertising, customers now tend to be a lot more selective: they remove stuff they feel they don’t need, and go with the stuff that they want. Therefore with IMC sellers can retain the attention of customer by diverting their attention through various Communication Mix.
Interested in learning about similar topics? Here few hand picked blogs for you –