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
Which mix for which objective: sixteen objectives and the disciplines that serve them
A practical chooser for the sixteen objectives marketers plan for: which disciplines usually lead, which support and what to measure, with the balance between brand and activation, the caveats that change the answer, and links to every primer and objective hub.
Planning frameworks: SOSTAC, RACE, the brief and the plan on a page
The 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.
Budgeting for IMC: setting the total and splitting it
How 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.
Objectives and KPIs: from business goals to what communication must change
Integrated 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.
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.
The IMC models: relationships, pillars, PESO and the stages of integration
Four 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.
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.