Integrated Marketing Communications: Putting It Together & Making It Work

Integrated Marketing Communications challenges business to confront a fundamental dilemma in today's marketing--the fact that mass media advertising, by itself, no longer works. This landmark book reveals that strategies long used to deliver selling messages to a mass culture through a single medium are now obsolete--and shows marketers how to get back on track.

The answer lies in customer-focused marketing, a key planning tool that can--in today's diverse, fragmented marketplace--explain the lifestyles, attitudes, and motivations of distinct buyer groups and predict their likely buying behaviors in the future. Schultz, Tannenbaum, and Lauterborn explain how, by beginning with detailed consumer information, marketers can build a synchronized, multi-channel communications strategy that reaches every market segment with a single, unified message.

This book also shows how to put an integrated program into practice, with expert guidance on planning, coordinating, and controlling the entire communications process. Along the way, the authors tackle those critical questions that too often impede marketing decisions, such as:

• Who should control the communications program?
• How should resources be allocated to advertising, sales promotion, direct response, public relations, and other marketing communications options?
• How can companies resolve "turf battles" and combat fears of budget loss?
• How should the different players--agencies and suppliers--be compensated?
• And most importantly, how can the impact of an integrated strategy be measured and made accountable?

Extensive examples and two in-depth success stories detail how top organizations are sharpening their competitive edge through integrated communications programs.

An incisive study of the barriers that confound today's marketing, Integrated Marketing Communications breaks new ground for all business thinkers and strategists.

Don E. Schultz is Professor of Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communications at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, where he and his associates have pioneered the country's first graduate program in Integrated Marketing Communications. He is also President of his own marketing communications and management firm, Agora, Inc., Evanston, Illinois.

Before joining Northwestern in 1977, Schultz was Senior Vice President of Tracy Locke Advertising and Public Relations in Dallas. He has consulted, lectured and held seminars on marketing, marketing communications, advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing and creative strategy in the United States, Europe, South America and Asia.

Schultz is Editor, Journal of Direct Marketing, Director of the Promotion Marketing Association of America, and the first recipient of the Direct Marketing Educator of the Year Award, presented by the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation.

Stanley Tannenbaum joined Northwestern University as Associate Professor in the Medill School of Journalism in 1983 and he now holds the Chair of the Advertising/ Integrated Marketing Communications Division.

Tannenbaum started in advertising as a copywriter at a small package goods agency in Philadelphia, working on the introduction of Alpo Dog Food. He then went to RCA as a writer in charge of Sales Promotion, Cooperative Advertising and Public Relations. From RCA, he moved to Kenyon & Eckhardt in New York, an international advertising agency, where he rose from copywriter to Chairman of the Board. After 26 years at K&E, he joined his client, Turtle Wax, as Executive Vice President.

Tannenbaum has served on the Board of the Association of American Advertising Agencies, the Advertising Council, and the National Advertising Review Board.

Robert E Lauterborn is the James L. Knight Professor of Advertising in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For ten years prior to this appointment, Lauterborn was director of marketing communication and corporate advertising for International Paper Company. Before joining IP, he spent 16 years with General Electric in various industrial and corporate positions.

Currently Lauterborn is a principal of Morgan, Anderson & Company, a leading marketing communications management consulting firm. He has served on the boards of many professional organizations, including the ANA, ARF, B/PAA, AAF, BPA, CBBB, NARB, and several companies.