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IMC foundations
What integrated marketing communications is, the models behind it, the customer journey, the message, objectives, budgets, planning, measurement and how teams organise for it.
- 1What integrated marketing communications is, and what it is notWhere the idea came from, how its definition moved from consistent tools to a managed business process, how it differs from multichannel and omnichannel, and the misreadings that keep it shallow.
- IMC began in 1989 as a planning idea for agencies and has become a business process: aimed at audiences, run across every contact point, judged on shared results.
- Omnichannel joins up the channels a customer uses; IMC joins up everything a brand says and does, for customers and for every other stakeholder.
- A matching look is the first stage of integration, not the goal. Test integration by asking whether the pieces share one idea, one audience view and one set of results.
- 2The IMC models: relationships, pillars, PESO and the stages of integrationFour models that shape how integration is planned: Duncan and Moriarty's relationship model, Kliatchko's four pillars, Gini Dietrich's PESO model and Schultz's stages. What each asks, how they differ, and when to reach for which.
- The models answer different questions: who the brand relates to (Duncan and Moriarty), what a programme must manage (Kliatchko), which media carry it (PESO) and how far integration has gone (Schultz).
- Use them together: Kliatchko's pillars as the headings of a brief, PESO to check the media mix, Duncan and Moriarty to list stakeholders and unplanned messages, the stages to pick the next step.
- Most organisations stop at a shared look and message. The stages that pay are the later ones: planning from the audience outwards and feeding results back into strategy.
- 3Touchpoints and the customer journey: from the funnel to the messy middleEvery contact with a brand is a message. How the consumer decision journey replaced the funnel, what Google's messy middle adds, how business buying groups decide, and how to map touchpoints to objectives.
- A touchpoint is any moment someone meets the brand: bought, owned, earned, or the product and service themselves. Map them all, including the ones nobody planned.
- Journeys loop rather than narrow. Brands are added and dropped during evaluation, and buyers cycle between exploring and evaluating, so being considered early and present in the middle both matter.
- In B2B the buyer is a group with conflicting goals. Give the group material it can agree on, and keep reaching the many who are not buying yet.
- 4The brand platform and the message house: one source for every disciplineWhat a brand platform holds (positioning, proposition, proof, voice), how to build a message house on top of it, and how one platform keeps advertising, PR, social, sales and service saying the same thing in their own words.
- Positioning needs three things: a frame of reference people understand, the points of parity that make you a legitimate choice, and points of difference that are compelling.
- A message house turns the platform into something teams can use: one umbrella message, three or four pillars, and proof under each. Nothing goes out that the house cannot support.
- Voice stays the same and tone changes with the moment. Write both down, with examples, so every team and every tool can apply them.
- 5Consistency and adaptation: one idea across channels, languages and culturesWhat to keep the same everywhere and what to adapt: the standardisation debate in international marketing, distinctive brand assets as the mechanism of consistency, and what changes for Arabic- and French-speaking markets.
- Keep the idea and the distinctive assets fixed; adapt language, references, offers and media. Consistency is about being recognised, not about every piece looking identical.
- Research on standardisation versus adaptation has no universal answer: it depends on the market and the moment. Decide element by element, with evidence from each market.
- Arabic and French markets need more than translation: right-to-left layouts, a chosen register, and language rules for advertising that differ by country.
- 6Objectives and KPIs: from business goals to what communication must changeIntegrated communication needs three linked layers of objectives (business, marketing, communication) and a short chain of KPIs for each. How the classic models help, where they mislead, and how AMEC's framework carries the same logic into PR and earned media.
- Write three objectives, not one: what the business must achieve, what customers must do, and what communication must change in their minds. Each layer explains the one above it.
- Give each objective one lagging KPI that proves it and one or two leading KPIs that let you steer. A metric that maps to no objective is noise.
- Treat the hierarchy of effects as a checklist of what must be true, not a fixed sequence, and never report AVEs or email opens as proof of value.
- 7Budgeting for IMC: setting the total and splitting itHow marketers set a communication budget (objective and task, percentage of sales, competitive parity, share of voice), what the evidence says about splitting it between brand and activation, and why the working versus non-working ratio is a poor guide.
- Build the total up from objectives and the tasks they need, then check it against share of voice and what the business can afford. Rules of thumb are checks, not methods.
- 60:40 between brand and activation is an average from consumer brands, not a law. The evidence moves it by category, and for B2B it sits close to even.
- Budget production, research and measurement as investments with a job, not as "non-working" waste to be minimised.
- 8Planning frameworks: SOSTAC, RACE, the brief and the plan on a pageThe planning models marketers use most (PR Smith's SOSTAC, Smart Insights' RACE, account planning), the documents that turn a plan into work (campaign brief, creative brief, media plan, the integrated plan on a page), and how to choose between them.
- A framework is a checklist of questions, not the plan. SOSTAC structures the whole plan; RACE organises the customer lifecycle inside it.
- Most plans fail at the brief. Marketers and agencies disagree sharply about brief quality, so write one shared brief that every discipline works from.
- Fit the whole integrated plan on one page: objectives, audience and insight, idea, channel roles, budget and calendar, measurement.
- 9Measuring effectiveness: models, attribution, experiments and triangulationWhat brand and activation effects are, and how marketing mix modelling, attribution, experiments, brand lift and the Barcelona Principles each measure part of them. No single method is enough; the answer is to use them together, each for the question it can answer.
- Brand effects are slow and long; activation effects are fast and short. Measure both, or the plan will drift towards whatever shows up this week.
- Attribution shows what came before a conversion, not what caused it. Use experiments to establish cause, and feed their results into the mix model.
- Triangulate: a mix model for budgets and strategy, experiments for proof, attribution for day-to-day optimisation, and the Barcelona Principles for communication and PR.
- 10Organising for IMC: agency models, in-housing, roles and AI in 2026Integration is decided by how people and agencies are organised: lead agency, holding-company team, roster, in-house or hybrid. What the ANA's in-house research shows, which roles hold a plan together, the three shared processes that matter most, and what the evidence says about AI in 2026.
- No agency model integrates by itself. Choose the model for your scale and needs, then make one person accountable for the integrated plan.
- Three shared processes do most of the integrating: one brief, one calendar, one measurement plan, used by every team and agency.
- AI is now near-universal among large advertisers, but full integration is rare. Govern it: approved tools, human review, disclosure from agencies.