Which mix for which objective: sixteen objectives and the disciplines that serve them

This chooser starts where a plan should start: with what has to change. For each of the sixteen objectives IMC Institute uses across its hubs, it names the disciplines that usually lead, those that usually support, and what to measure, with links to each discipline's primer and each objective's hub.

• Start from the objective, not the channel. Decide what people must know, feel or do, then choose the disciplines that can make it happen.
• One or two disciplines lead; the rest support. Supporting disciplines prepare the ground, carry the idea further or collect the response.
• Balance brand and activation. Binet and Field's analyses for the IPA found brand building slow and lasting, activation quick and short-lived, and the two working best together¹.
• Measure each objective twice: one lagging KPI that proves it, one or two leading KPIs to steer by (objectives and KPIs).
• The leads and supports are our reading of the eighteen primers, a starting point, not a rule. Budget, category, region and regulation change the answer.
• As of: October 2026.

Start from the objective, not the channel

Teams often start with a channel they like ("we need an event") and look for a reason afterwards. Reverse the order. Write the business objective, the marketing objective beneath it and the communication objective beneath that. Find the communication objective below, read its leads and supports, and open the primers to check the fit with your market and audience. Touchpoints and the customer journey shows where each discipline acts in the journey.

Then check the mix against the four kinds of media. Gini Dietrich's PESO model names them paid, earned, shared and owned, and Spin Sucks presents it as a way of integrating all four into one programme that builds awareness, reputation and credibility². If one kind carries everything, ask whether some of that attention could be earned or owned instead of bought.

Balance brand and activation

Most objectives sit between brand building, which creates memory and preference that pay back over months and years, and sales activation, which prompts people ready to act now. The IPA's ten-year review of Binet and Field's work puts the best average split at 60:40 in favour of brand building in The Long and the Short of It and 62:38 in Effectiveness in Context, and argues that effectiveness fell as activation's share of budgets rose³. Category moves the number: Mark Ritson, summarising Binet and Field, gives 80:20 for financial services⁴, and Binet and Field found the best-performing B2B split closer to 46:54⁵.

So a plan made only of activation (search, offers, affiliates, retargeting) harvests demand without replacing it. Reach matters long before anyone buys: McKinsey found that impressions gathered when people are not shopping decide which brands enter the starting set⁶. In B2B, John Dawes's 95:5 rule holds that only a small minority of buyers are in market at any time, about 5% a quarter where firms switch supplier roughly every five years⁷.

• Brand awareness. Leads: advertising, out-of-home, video and CTV in digital advertising, paid social. Supports: sponsorship, public relations, content and creators; awareness was the top goal in the IAB's survey of creator marketing, at 43%⁸. Use brand lift and share of search along the way, and judge over months: brand effects build slowly¹.
• Product launch. Leads: advertising for fame, public relations for credibility, social and creators for short video; a staged reveal at an event suits cars and consumer tech. Supports: paid search, which covers the new name from day one, sampling from sales promotion, and email to existing customers.
• Rebrand. Start with internal communications: staff should hear before customers, and Gartner found 73% of HR leaders saying employees are fatigued from change⁹. Then public relations explains and advertising makes the new look familiar. Test the fame and uniqueness of each distinctive brand asset in each market before you drop it¹⁰; see consistency and adaptation.
• Market entry. John Philip Jones called brands whose share of voice runs ahead of their market share "investing", typical of new brands¹¹; a newcomer is an investing brand in its new market. Leads: advertising, public relations, local sponsorship and local creators. Supports: out-of-home, paid search and local affiliate publishers. Budget per market (budgeting for IMC).

• Lead generation. Leads: search, gated guides and webinars in content, trade shows in events, nurture by email. Supports: retargeting in digital advertising, qualification by messaging, lead partners in affiliate marketing, direct marketing. Lead scoring speeds the follow-up. Keep some brand building: most business buyers are not in market yet⁷.
• Customer acquisition. Leads: digital advertising, search, affiliate comparison sites and direct marketing with a clear offer. Supports: a coupon from sales promotion, events in B2B, creators for new audiences. Track customer acquisition cost and test with a holdout: in large experiments at Facebook, observational methods often failed to reproduce the effects the experiments measured¹².
• Conversion. Leads: search, retail media and retargeting in digital advertising, email, messaging and sales promotion. Supports: affiliate, social commerce on social, comparison content, basket reminders from CRM. Judge promotions on incremental profit over a long enough window: their volume comes mostly from existing buyers and leaves no lasting lift¹³, yet 81% of UK marketers judge them over less than 13 weeks¹⁴.
• Event promotion. Leads: invitations by email, reminders and directions by messaging, countdowns on social. Supports: out-of-home near the venue, industry creators, community meet-ups, public relations. Attendance is an output, not the result; in CEIR's exhibition data, attendance and real revenues have moved at different speeds¹⁵.

• Retention and loyalty. Leads: CRM and loyalty, which decides who hears what and when, and email. Supports: messaging, direct marketing (in JICMAIL's tracking, mail to existing customers does best¹⁶), community, user events. After a purchase the journey loops back into loyalty or into a new search⁶. Measure churn with clicks and sales, not opens: Apple's Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from knowing whether a message was opened¹⁷.
• Community building. Leads: community and organic social. Supports: content made with members, events, ambassadors from influencer marketing, member data in CRM. Compare members' retention rate with non-members' from a baseline set at launch: proving ROI is the field's top challenge, and 17% of community teams have no full-time staff¹⁸.
• Advocacy and referral. Leads: community programmes and CRM and loyalty, which can ask promoters to recommend a friend. Supports: affiliate tracking, social, creators. In Nielsen's 2021 US study, recommendations from people they know were the most trusted source, at 89%¹⁹. Treat NPS with care: a replication found Reichheld's original analysis showed a link with past growth, not that the score predicts future growth²⁰. Never buy praise; the FTC's rule bans fake reviews and buying positive or negative ones²¹.

• Reputation and crisis. Leads: public relations, with a rehearsed crisis plan and a message house, and internal communications, so employees hear the facts first. Supports: social, often where a problem first becomes public. Never report AVEs: AMEC's Barcelona Principles state that they are not the value of communication²².
• Thought leadership. Leads: research and opinion in content, experts put forward by public relations. Supports: speaking at events, an email newsletter, industry creators. In CMI's research 96% of B2B marketers say their organisation creates thought-leadership content²³, so substance decides. Measure outputs, outcomes and potential impact, as the Barcelona Principles ask²², not page views.
• Employer brand. Leads: internal communications, because the story must be true inside first, social on professional networks and content about the people and the work. Supports: public relations, sponsorship. When staff share it, it is an endorsement: the FTC says employees who promote their employer's products should disclose that they work there²⁴. See employee advocacy.
• Internal engagement. Leads: internal communications, through line managers and two-way channels. Supports: town halls and kick-offs (events) and public relations, so inside and outside hear one story. Brief managers first: 74% of HR leaders told Gartner that managers are not equipped to lead change⁹.

Proving effectiveness has no lead discipline: the measurement plan leads and every discipline feeds it. CRM and loyalty data shows what each campaign changed, and in direct marketing every campaign doubles as a test. The IPA's Making Effectiveness Work states that there is no silver bullet: marketing mix modelling, experiments and attribution each have a role and limits, and used separately they fragment knowledge into silos²⁵.

Some disciplines are harder to prove than others: in WARC's survey, only 19% of sponsorship professionals were confident they could measure the business return of their sponsorships²⁶. Plan incrementality tests and the brand tracker before launch; measuring effectiveness shows how the methods fit together.

The leads and supports above are defaults. Four things move them.

• Budget. A small budget cannot buy weight everywhere; the advertising primer suggests one medium or one region rather than spreading thin. Disciplines that run on people more than media money (content, email, community, PR) carry more of the load. See budgeting for IMC.
• Category. The brand and activation balance shifts with how people buy: 80:20 in financial services, 46:54 in B2B⁴⁵. Categories that sell to almost everyone lean on mass reach; repeat-purchase categories lean on CRM.
• Region and audience. Platforms, media habits and rules differ by country, so check where your audience is before choosing platforms or networks. In France, adverts need not be solely in French, but consumers must understand them, so foreign terms need a legible translation²⁷; in the UAE, The National reported that the National Media Council required advertisements in standard Arabic or the Emirati dialect²⁸. See consistency and adaptation.
• Regulation. This is not legal advice; read the rules section of each primer you use. Consent for email, messaging and calls in direct marketing; disclosure for creators, affiliates and communities; prior prices and prize draws in sales promotion; profiling in CRM and loyalty; Olympic Rule 40 in sponsorship.

1. Write the business, marketing and communication objectives in one sentence each.
2. Find each communication objective above; pick one or two leads and name the supports and their jobs.
3. Check the mix against PESO.
4. Choose the brand and activation balance for your category, and write down why.
5. Set one lagging and one or two leading KPIs per objective, with baselines, before launch.
6. Read the rules section of every primer you use, for every market.
7. Put it on a page (planning frameworks), with one brief, one calendar and one measurement plan for every team (organising for IMC).

• Binet and Field's ten principles¹, the IPA's ten-year review³, the splits by category⁴⁵ and the 95:5 rule⁷.
• McKinsey's consumer decision journey⁶, the PESO model², the IPA's Making Effectiveness Work²⁵ and the Barcelona Principles²².
• The IMC foundations: what is IMC, the IMC models, touchpoints and the journey, the brand platform and the message house, consistency and adaptation, objectives and KPIs, budgeting, planning frameworks, measuring effectiveness and organising for IMC.
• Every primer ends with "When to choose it" for its discipline. The glossary defines IMC, KPI and the other terms used here.