Learn · every claim sourced
Understand integrated marketing, step by step
Plain-language foundations, primers and guides on integrated marketing communications, with a source for every claim. New here? Begin with the short reads below.
The library
Internal comms 101: employees are the first audience
Internal communication keeps the people who deliver the brand informed, involved and able to speak for it. It belongs in IMC because customers meet the brand through employees, and it runs on leaders, line managers and a few well-run channels more than on any single tool.
Community 101: a brand people belong to, not just follow
A brand community is a group of customers and fans who talk to each other, not only to the brand, in a space the brand helps run. It turns word of mouth into a programme: owned forums and groups, ambassadors and user-generated content, with moderation and disclosure duties that come with them.
Sponsorship 101: borrowing meaning from what people already love
Sponsorship buys the right to be associated with a team, an event, a cultural institution or a cause. The rights fee is only the entry ticket: value comes from activating those rights across the plan, protecting them from ambush marketing within the law, and measuring their effect with the same rigour as any other investment.
Content 101: earning attention with things worth reading, watching and hearing
Content marketing publishes useful articles, videos, podcasts and newsletters so that people come to the brand rather than the other way round. It needs an editorial strategy, a production line that people and AI share, distribution across owned, earned, shared and paid channels, clear labels when content is paid for or machine-made, and measures beyond page views.
Consistency and adaptation: one idea across channels, languages and cultures
What 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.
The brand platform and the message house: one source for every discipline
What 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.
What integrated marketing communications is, and what it is not
Where 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.