What integrated marketing communications is, and what it is not

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is the practice of planning every way a brand speaks and acts (advertising, public relations, digital, social, email, events, sales and service) as one programme built on one idea, aimed at the people who matter to the business, and judged by what the parts achieve together rather than channel by channel.

• Where it comes from: a 1989 definition from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4As), and research that Don Schultz and colleagues at Northwestern University's Medill school began with the 4As in 1991¹².
• How it changed: the definition moved from "make the communication tools consistent" to "manage a business process aimed at audiences and measured on results"⁷⁹.
• How it differs from omnichannel: omnichannel joins up the channels a customer uses; IMC joins up everything a brand says and does, for customers and for other stakeholders⁹¹¹.
• The common mistake: treating integration as a matching look. A shared look is where integration starts, not where it ends¹⁶.

Terms used here are in the glossary.

The idea took shape in the late 1980s, and its definition has been argued over ever since⁸. Four moments matter.

The 4As definition (1989). The 4As described IMC as a concept of marketing communications planning that sees added value in one comprehensive plan: a plan that weighs the strategic role of each communication discipline (the definition names general advertising, direct response, sales promotion and public relations) and combines them to give clarity, consistency and maximum communications impact¹. The weight falls on the plan and on the agency's disciplines. Notice what it leaves out: the customer, data and measurement.

The Medill research (1991–1993). In 1991, working with the 4As, Schultz and his colleagues at Medill began what the school describes as the first empirical study of how practitioners were using IMC, looking at how far major US agencies had adopted it². Later reviews of the field date the research tradition to that study, which looked only at the United States³. The same year, Medill launched what it describes as the first graduate programme in IMC in the United States⁴. The research became the basis of the 1993 textbook Integrated Marketing Communications²⁵.

Schultz's later definitions. Schultz kept revising the idea for the rest of his career. A later definition associated with his work, still used in university glossaries such as Monash Business School's, describes IMC as a strategic process "used to plan, develop, execute and evaluate coordinated, measurable, persuasive brand communication programs"⁷. The 2004 book IMC: The Next Generation, by Don and Heidi Schultz, went further: it put brands at the centre, set out a five-step process, focused on individuals rather than market segments, made measurement and accountability part of the job, and took a global view⁶.

Kliatchko's synthesis (2005 and 2008). Jerry Kliatchko reviewed the competing definitions in the International Journal of Advertising in 2005 and proposed his own⁸. In 2008, after reviewing the academic IMC literature from 1990 to 2006, he revised it: IMC is an audience-driven business process of strategically managing the stakeholders, content, channels and results of brand communication programmes⁹. Those four nouns are the "pillars" explained in the IMC models.

General marketing textbooks now treat integration as part of the core. In the current editions of Kotler and Keller's Marketing Management, the part on communicating value includes a chapter on designing an integrated marketing campaign in the digital age¹⁰.

The three words are often used as if they meant the same thing. They describe different scopes.

Multichannel means being present in several channels. Each channel can keep its own plan, team and measures. Retail researchers describe multichannel as the approach that was in vogue in the decade before omnichannel took over¹¹.

Omnichannel joins those channels up around the customer. Peter Verhoef, P. K. Kannan and Jeffrey Inman define omnichannel management as "the synergetic management of the numerous available channels and customer touchpoints", with the aim of optimising both the customer's experience across channels and the channels' performance¹¹.

IMC is wider in two ways. It covers communication in every form, from advertising and direct response to sales promotion and public relations, not only the channels where people buy¹. And it addresses stakeholders, not only customers: Kliatchko puts stakeholders first among his four pillars⁹. Employees, investors, partners, journalists and communities all receive messages from the brand, and all pass them on.

In practice the three nest inside each other. A brand can be multichannel without being omnichannel. It can be omnichannel in its sales journey while its advertising, its press office and its employer brand tell three different stories. IMC is the discipline that makes them one story.

When Schultz and Philip Kitchen asked why companies were working this way, they found a response to several pressures: the use of databases, media fragmentation, clients' demand for synergy and the need to coordinate globally. They concluded that IMC was neither a passing management fad nor a new label for old practice, but a fundamental and probably permanent shift¹². Each of those pressures is stronger now.

• More contact points. People form impressions of brands from advertisements, news reports, conversations with family and friends, and their own experience of the product¹³. Only some of those are bought. Every one is a message the brand either plans or leaves to chance. See touchpoints and the customer journey.
• Pressure to prove results. Kliatchko made results one of the four pillars of IMC⁹. Marketing leaders hear the same demand from finance: Gartner's 2025 survey of 402 chief marketing officers found marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of company revenue for a second year¹⁴. A flat budget spread across more channels has to work as a system.
• Generative AI. It is now cheap to produce many versions of everything. In the same survey, CMOs reported the returns from generative AI mainly as time efficiency (49%) and cost efficiency (40%), and 22% said it had reduced their need for outside creative and strategy support¹⁴. More versions, made faster, by more people and more tools, make a shared platform more necessary, not less. Consistency can no longer be enforced by one agency's creative director; the brief, the brand platform and the rules have to carry it.

"Integration means everything looks the same." Call it the matching-luggage view: the same logo, colours and slogan on every piece. In Schultz and Kitchen's development model, this kind of message integration is only the first of four stages. The later stages bring in the customer's point of view, data on results, and a feedback loop into strategic planning, and studies find that few organisations reach them¹⁶. A matching look with contradictory offers, prices or service is not integrated.

"IMC is a media plan." A media plan is one output of IMC. Since 1989 the definitions have put the plan across disciplines, and later the business process, at the centre¹⁹.

"IMC means one agency doing everything." The first definition came from an agency association, and the early research studied agencies¹². The definitions since then centre on the audience and on the business process, not on who holds the contract⁹. How to organise people and partners is the subject of organising for IMC.

"IMC is only for big brands." Nothing in any of the definitions above depends on the size of the budget. A small business with a website, a newsletter, a social account and a shop counter controls more of its contact points than most multinationals do.

"It is an old idea, so it is finished." Schultz died in 2020 at 86⁵. Mark Ritson's tribute in Marketing Week argued that integrated marketing must not die with him¹⁵. The pressures behind it have only grown¹².

A first pass for any team, in an afternoon:

1. Write the one idea your communication should add up to, in a sentence a new employee could repeat. If you cannot, start with the brand platform and the message house.
2. List every contact point, including the ones you do not pay for: reviews, the invoice, the call centre's hold message, what staff post. Use touchpoints and the customer journey.
3. Name the stakeholders beyond customers who hear from you, and who speaks to them. Employees are usually the first gap; see internal communications.
4. Set shared objectives that every discipline contributes to, rather than one target per channel. See objectives and KPIs and the measurement hub.
5. Put five recent pieces side by side: an advertisement, a press release, a social post, an email and a sales deck. Do they make the same promise to the same person? Mark every contradiction.
6. Decide who owns integration: one named person or forum that can say no to a piece that does not fit.

• The origins: Medill's own account of the 1991 study with the 4As², Kitchen and Schultz's multi-country comparison in the Journal of Advertising Research³, and Medill's tribute to Schultz⁴.
• The definitions: the 4As wording as discussed in a 2020 review¹, Schultz and Schultz's IMC: The Next Generation⁶, and Kliatchko's two papers in the International Journal of Advertising⁸⁹.
• The wider field: Verhoef, Kannan and Inman on omnichannel¹¹, and Schultz and Kitchen on why companies work this way¹².
• Next in this track: the IMC models, touchpoints and the customer journey, the brand platform and the message house, consistency and adaptation.