Consumers have come a long way since the 1960s when John Fitzgerald Kennedy established the Consumers Bill of Rights. In actuality, the consumers have grown skeptical, due to gaps between what company's say and in how they (or their products) actually perform. Enter Integrated Marketing Communication (hereafter referred to as IMC). The decline in corporations and their productivity has led to a new movement intending to integrate the three main assets of business: public relations (hereafter referred to as PR), advertising and marketing. The purpose of this paper is to determine the role of PR in IMC; however, in order to do this, we must first understand what IMC is and what purpose it serves.
In recent years there has been a shift from the emphasis on the individual spectrums of advertising, marketing, and PR to movement toward IMC. Its goal? To create a unified message. To find one efficient definition of IMC is hard to come by; however, loosely defined Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is:.
The process of building and reinforcing mutually profitable relationships with employees, customers, other stake holders, and the general public by developing and coordinating a strategic communications program that enables them to make constructive contact with the company/brand through a variety of media (Arens, IT10).
Initially companies took an inside-out view of IMC. To them it was a means to coordinate and manage advertising, PR and marketing in order to give a consistent message to their target audience. This idea was soon ousted by the outside-in perspective. Outside-in sees consumers as partners in a lasting, continual relationship, knowing every last detail from their buying references to the ways in which they come into contact with companies or brands. In this perspective, the customer, not the employer or employees, are their biggest assets. .
Tom Duncan, former director of the IMC grad program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, identified four levels of integration that companies use-consciously or unconsciously-in IMC.
