Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is the strategic planning of all of an organizations communication efforts around some
Question:
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is the strategic planning of all of an organizations communication efforts around some central message strategies. It is become more and more important to successful marketing as the number of communication outlets through which we try to communicate with customers has increased. Gone are the day where a large corporation might show national advertisements on TV and in magazines that were highly coordinated and often completely connected and then they just had to match the salespeople message to those advertisements. Today marketing communications come in a huge variety of forms and target a multitude of different customer groups. Therefore it is critical to have a consistent communication strategy that integrates all these efforts across all the potential outlets and potential target market groups.
Related to this the complexity of organizational structures has increased to accommodate different employee skill sets and organizational needs.In the past there may have been a Marketing Department that handled all marketing tasks, but today there are typically multiple departments (research, sales, advertising, public relations, distribution) that handle a piece of the marketing tasks. Therefore a typical large corporation today may have an organizational hierarchy that includes and Executive Board, including Chairperson level employees, then under that organizational level would be departmental Vice Presidents, including for example, Finance Vice President, Sales Vice President, Research Vice President, Advertising Vice President, Public Relations Vice President, Distribution Vice President. Then under each of those departmental Vice Presidents would be the employees of each of those specific departments.
1. Does this current move to integrated marketing communications (IMC) require organizational structure changes to produce the best marketing efforts?
2. If you think changes are needed, tell me what those changes are and tell me how they would help to improve the marketing communication efforts.
3. If you think no changes are needed, how can the organization create a consistent marketing effort with the current structure that is communicated effectively throughout the entire organization?