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to assist in understanding their
capabilities, the idea of integration was
not considered as a possible approach to
developing more effective campaigns at
that time.
The literature before the Caywood,
Schultz, and Wang (1991) report, which
was among the first studies conducted on
IMC and certainly the best known, reveals
that the idea of integration was actually
there—underlying the surface, but
little or no effort was channeled into developing
the concept. Schultz (1991), another
early writer in this area, was one of
the first to recognize that there was no
smoke without fire. He noted then that
IMC was provoking much media hype
and debate albeit at the practitioner level.
Following these early studies, a veritable
wave of academic articles started to
appear in the academic literature. Miller
and Rose (1994) noted that there was increasing
support for the unification of all
communication activities under a single
concept, and the evolving paradigm of
IMC was the undoubted stimuli for such
unification. A year earlier, Schultz (1993a,
1993b) recognized that IMC had become
“one of the hottest topics in the whole
marketing arena” (1993a, p. 6), but questioned
whether or not IMC was just another
managerial fad—a question that has
been reiterated many times since. Acheson
(1993) also noted that a significant number
of practitioners and academics were
exploring new methods of promotional
integration. Integration apparently provided
a framework to consider the wider
ramifications of marketing communications
by recognizing not just the value of
each discipline, but also the value of
juxtaposition.
Just three years later, amidst a growing
chorus of approving integrators, Schultz
(1996) presented an IMC study conducted
in 1995 among Indian advertisers, revealing
that marketing managers and organizations
around the world were becoming
more and more alike. Indian marketers,
even in 1995, were apparently familiar
with the IMC concept even if they did not
actively undertake implementation. They
expected, for example, that all marketing
communications components needed to
be coordinated more closely. However, the
ideal of integration at that time implied
THE EMERGENCE OF IMC
20 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH March 2004
working with one agency and, in 1995,
many marketers were very reluctant to
depend on one agency to integrate their
marketing communications programs.
Thus, successful further development of
IMC above and beyond tactical juxtaposition
would rely heavily on marketing budgets,
staffing, skills, and infrastructure. It
could not just rely on integration of promotional
mix elements at the agency level.
But already, popularity for integrated approaches
in the United States had swollen
to such proportions that most respondents
in a national survey of advertisers
believed that integration would increase
the impact of their marketing communication
programs (Schultz, 1996).
The diffusion curve of IMC now began
to accelerate and with increasing worldwide
interest in the emergent concept.
Kitchen and Schultz (1997, 1999) undertook
a series of exploratory studies to
investigate its development in terms of
its theoretical foundations initially in two
of the most advanced economies in the
world. Their firs