Esther Thorson
University ot Missouri-Columbia

Jeri Moore
CCS Ltd.

Integrated marketing communications are those messages that
address multiple consumer and nonconsumer audiences and
achieve synergy of messages and timing.

The concept of integrated marketing communication (IMC) continues to
produce both intense interest (e.g., "Ad Age", 1993) and a violent negative
response, generally along the lines of "Why do these people think they've
invented something new? We've been doing integrated marketing for
years?" (e.g., Duncan & Caywood, chapter 1, this volume). It is true, in
fact, that many smaller advertising agencies have been using a variety of
persuasive tools to market their clients' brands ( Gronstedt & Thorson,
1993 ), and that there are many examples of brand campaigns that have
coordinated to one degree or another a number of persuasive tools.
However, many-if not most-marketers that employ advertising, public
relations, direct marketing, and promotions companies to produce multiple
messages about the same brands do not fully integrate their communica-
tions in the sense used in this book.

This brings us to the question of what, precisely, we mean by IMC. For
us, IMC is the strategic coordination of multiple communication voices. Its
aim is to optimize the impact of persuasive communication on both
consumer and nonconsunier (e.g., trade, professional) audiences by coor-
dinating such elements of the marketing mix as advertising, public relations,
promotions, direct marketing, and package design. Although there are a
number of important publications that have focused on this issue (e.g.,
Schultz, Tannenbaum, & Lauterborn, 1992 ; Wang & Petrison, 1991 ), there

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