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000)
• the fact that “the world has changed,
the nature and forms of communication
have changed, and, therefore, the
practice of developing and managing
marketing and communication must
change as well” (Kitchen and Schultz,
2000, p. 16)
All of these changes have been used to
buttress the argument concerning the development
of IMC. As we have seen, the
early literature indicated that IMC has
stimulated significant interest in the marketing
world. An early paper of Caywood,
Schultz, and Wang (1991) shows
that the majority of enquiries, philosophies,
and arguments reviewed in this
paper are around 10 years old, making
this a comparatively new, dynamic area
of research that still could be in an early
growth phase (Kitchen and Schultz, 1999).
Although there has been some skepticism
in the past surrounding the value of an
IMC campaign, “. . . there seems little
doubt that IMC is an emergent concept
whose time seems to have arrived”
(Kitchen, 1999, p. 211).
But has IMC really conquered the literature
so easily? Has it been so readily
absorbed by clients, adverting agencies,
and public relations agencies? As we have
seen in this article, there are dissenting
voices among the crescendo of chorused
approvals. Perhaps the best way to illustrate
the weakness of IMC is to consider
both the positive and the negative aspects.
Pros and cons about IMC
As with the debate concerning whether
e-commerce represents the “new economy”
or “bubble economy” for every piece
of new thinking and innovative theory,
there are different views and disparate
voices. It is the same with the “one sight,
one voice” marketing communication concept
in the academic field. At the very
beginning when the IMC concept was initiated,
advertising educators were in favor
of IMC, seeing it as the best of both
worlds. Public relations educators, on the
other hand, tended to be vehemently opposed
(Miller and Rose, 1994). A number
of public relations thinkers and practitioners
saw IMC as not only an encroachment
but also a form of marketing imperialism
where public relations was concerned (Dozier
and Lauzen, 1990) because public relations
was seen as a management function,
while advertising and other forms of promotion
are seen as part of the marketing
function. Wightman (1999) assumed that
IMC was only an excuse for advertising
agencies to engulf public relations to deal
with reductions in client budgets for mass
media communications. However, Miller
and Rose’s research with advertising and
public relations practitioners shows that
public relations professionals support integrated
marketing communications and
had even accepted it as a reality and necessity
(Miller and Rose, 1994). Moriarty
(1994) argued that public relations had
much to contribute as well as benefit from
IMC thinking. Later on, some academics
questioned the newness of the IMC concept.
Spotts, Lambert, and Joyce (1998)
claimed that the bulk of the IMC literature
is a development parallel to marketing
that misrepresents marketing and
merely reinvents and renames existing concepts.
Hutton (1995) even likened IMC to
new wine put into old wineskins. There
has also been the debate of whether IMC
is a “management fashion” or a “developing
academic theory” (Schultz and
Kitch