EJM-08-2015-0591 Integrated Marketing Communication From An Instrumental To A Customercentric

European Journal of Marketing
Integrated marketing communication – from an instrumental to a customer-

centric perspective
Manfred Bruhn, Stefanie Schnebelen,
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EJM
51,3
Integrated marketing
communication – from
an instrumental to a
464 customer-centric perspective
Received 30 August 2015 Manfred Bruhn and Stefanie Schnebelen

Revised 26 November 2015
Accepted 22 December 2015
Department of Marketing and Management, University of Basel,
Basel, Switzerland
Abstract
Purpose – Despite decades of scientific and practical experience in the field of integrated marketing
communication (IMC), little is known about the role of IMC in the era of new media. The purpose of the present
paper is to undertake a first step to close this gap by proposing thought-provoking impulses for
customer-centric IMC. This is done by discussing central premises of customer-centric IMC in terms of the
changed conditions on the media markets, its challenges and principles and its implementation issues.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a conceptual approach to customer-centric IMC
by deriving new lines of thinking from a review of existing literature relating to the concept of IMC.
Findings – The paper positions customer-centric IMC as an important advancement of IMC. It shows that the
most important new lines of thinking which could be adopted as strategic components of customer-centric IMC are
relationship orientation, content orientation and process orientation. The paper thus suggests that customer-centric
IMC is a balancing act between a company’s own branding activities and the integration of customer-centered
issues.
Originality/value – The originality of this paper resides in a detailed conceptual discussion of new
insights into a customer-centric IMC. In contrast to existing work on IMC, this paper threads together the
existing perspectives on IMC (inside-out and outside-in) to highlight the potential role of IMC in the era of
social media (customer-centric IMC) by adding an outside-out view to the concept of IMC.
Keywords Social media, Integrated marketing communications, Customer-centric IMC
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is a promising communication concept that is more
than simply the integration, coordination and unification of communication instruments: It is
about strategic positioning; managerial, organizational and personnel issues; and relationships
(Finne and Grönroos, 2009; Kliatchko, 2008). The impetus for the IMC discussion in research and
practice is provided by the great potential that IMC has to influence business performance, to
confer competitive advantages on companies, to increase brand equity and to ensure
communication effectiveness and consistency by facilitating the achievement of communication
and marketing goals (Luxton et al., 2015; Madhavaram et al., 2005; Reid, 2003, 2005).
Current work on IMC reflects more than 20 years of research and practice. The body of
IMC literature devotes attention to issues concerning the concept of IMC (e.g. definition,
European Journal of Marketing conceptual developments, conceptualization, determinants and consequences) and the
Vol. 51 No. 3, 2017
pp. 464-489 implementation of IMC (e.g. management process, organizational structure, personnel
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0309-0566
aspects) (Kitchen and Schultz, 1999; Kitchen et al., 2004; Kliatchko, 2005; Caywood et al.,
DOI 10.1108/EJM-08-2015-0591 1991; Duncan and Caywood, 1996; Reid, 2005). However, IMC discussions reached a zenith
several years ago, and subsequently abated. It is not surprising therefore that little has been Integrated
done on the IMC concept in the context of new media (Kliatchko, 2008; Peltier et al., 2003). marketing
The emergence of the internet provided the stimulus for substantial changes in the
communication landscape. In its early stages, the internet was regarded and handled as a
communication
publishing platform that enabled companies to disseminate information to a broad public. At this
time, consumers could only search for information and read it, such that content contributions
were reserved for companies and interactions were limited (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; O’Reilly,
2007). The emergence of social media adds a new and unique communication dimension to this
465
hitherto one-way communication: multi-way communication. As a consequence, the focus shifts

“from companies to consumers, individuals to communities, nodes to networks, publishing to
participation, and intrusion to invitation” (Berthon et al., 2012, p. 262). Social media can be used by
companies to interact with their customers (communication flows from the company to
customers), and it can be used by customers to interact with the company (communication flows
from customers to the company) and with other customers (communication flows from
customers to customers; Mangold and Faulds, 2009).
In this respect, social media offer both companies and customers new and efficient ways
of engaging with one another, such that communication between companies and customers
is facilitated (Wang et al., 2012). From the company’s perspective, the value-generating
potential of social media stems from their great capacity for fostering relationships,
interacting with all stakeholders (e.g. new and existing customers, general public),
disseminating target group-specific information, influencing customer perceptions and
gaining customer insights. From the customer’s perspective, the value-generating potential
of social media relates to the power they give individual customers to create their own
contents, to express their opinions and to obtain free and easy access to a wide range of
product and brand information that facilitate their purchase decisions (Vries et al., 2012;
Wang et al., 2012; Trusov et al., 2009).
Despite this growing importance and reinforced implementation of social media within
the communication mix which has fundamentally revolutionized the media landscape and
offers considerable opportunities and challenges for companies, it is surprising that there is
only moderate interest in IMC research in the context of social media presently.
Changing conditions in the media and communication markets caused by the emergence of
new media require the reorganization and extension of IMC tasks and, consequently, increase the
complexity and challenges of IMC; here, it is important to note that stakeholders’ activities in
social media (e.g. expressing and sharing their opinions about and experiences with a company)
have a substantial influence on a company’s success and IMC practices, especially with regard to
establishing communication consistency in the uncontrolled space of social media (Kliatchko,
2008; Shin, 2013; Peltier et al., 2003). It is therefore necessary that a company’s IMC activities are
aligned to its stakeholder groups. As a consequence, it is no longer sufficient to focus purely on
early IMC concepts from an inside-out perspective in the era of social media (Luck and Moffatt,
2009). What is required is a customer-centric view on IMC. Consequently, the prevailing
information distribution paradigm (an inside-out perspective) needs to be enriched by an
information co-creation paradigm (an outside-in and an outside-out perspective).
As the research on IMC in the context of social media is in its infancy, this paper proposes a
conceptual approach for this field of research investigation. Following the call for research
expressed by Luck and Moffatt (2009), in which they identify the need for IMC to be captured as
a broader concept, the present paper extends the scope of the IMC concept by formulating the
major tenets of IMC and forecasting trends in its development in the era of social media
(customer-centric IMC). For this purpose, we first identify the major changes in the IMC concept
and in the media landscape to demonstrate that the IMC concept is not only as relevant today as
EJM it was in the past, but also that the era of social media makes it more important than ever before.
51,3 Second, we use the latter findings to discuss the central challenges of IMC. Third, to introduce
thought-provoking impulses to customer-centric IMC, we analyze principles of IMC that are
suitable for this purpose. Fourth, based on these principles, we discuss implementation issues for
customer-centric IMC. Overall, the paper shows that IMC is faced in the uncontrolled space of
social media with a balancing act between establishing a uniform and consistent corporate
466 appearance of a company, and building, cultivating, maintaining and regulating multilateral
interaction relationships with stakeholders.
The evolving concept of integrated marketing communication

Definitional development
Although several on-going discussions seek to determine a satisfactory definition for the IMC
concept, no consensus has yet been reached. There is, nevertheless, agreement that the core of
IMC concerns the value-optimizing management task performed by company-owned
communication activities. Beginning with the definition of the American Association of
Advertising Agencies in 1989, the early definitions of IMC are characterized by having a more
tactical and centralized perspective. Through time, the definitions have gradually adopted a more
strategic and customer-oriented perspective that has expanded to include not only customers as
the central target group but also all internal and external stakeholders (Kerr et al., 2008). The
definitions of IMC presented in Table I indicate the outlined development.
Tying in with this definitional development, IMC is defined as a strategic and operative
process which involves analysis, planning, organizing, implementing and monitoring and
which aims to communicate a coherent and consistent image of a company or reference
American Association of Advertising “A concept of marketing communications planning that recognises the added
Agencies (1989) of Advertising Agencies value in a programme that integrates a variety of
strategic disciplines–e.g. general advertising, direct response, sales
promotion and public relations–and combines these disciplines to provide
clarity, consistency and maximum communication impact”
Duncan (2002) “A cross-functional process for creating and nourishing profitable
relationships with customers and other stakeholders by strategically
controlling or influencing all messages sent to these groups and encouraging
data-driven purposeful dialogue with them”
Schultz and Schultz (2004) “IMC is a strategic business process used to plan, develop, execute and
evaluate coordinated, measurable, persuasive brand communication
programmes over time with consumers, customers, prospects, and other
targeted, relevant external and internal audiences”
Kliatchko (2005) “MC is the concept and process of strategically managing audience-focused,
channel-centred and results-driven brand communication programmes over
time”
Bruhn (2008) “A strategic and operative process which involves analysis, planning,
organizing, implementing, and monitoring and which aims to communicate a
coherent and consistent image of a company or reference object by
integrating the company’s distinctive sources of internal and external
communications”
Šerić et al. (2015) “A tactical and strategic consumer-centric business process, boosted by
advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) which, on the
basis of information obtained from customers databases, delivers a clear and
consistent message through the coordination and synergies of different
communications tools and channels, in order to nourish long-lasting
Table I. profitable relationships with customers and other stakeholders and create
Definitions of IMC and maintain brand equity”
object by integrating the company’s distinctive sources of internal and external Integrated
communications (Bruhn, 2008). Hence, the functions of IMC extend far beyond the mere marketing
formal (i.e. compliance with formal design principles such as fonts/sizes, colors, key visuals),
timed (i.e. coordination of communication activities within and between planning periods)
communication
and content-based (thematic coordination by connection lines such as messages, arguments
and statements) integration and unification of communication activities; instead, it focuses
on the management process for integrating internal and external communication.
467
Conceptual development
Existing IMC concepts. The definitional development of IMC is accompanied by a conceptual
development of IMC concepts, which occurred in the USA and Europe simultaneously, but
independently. The growing body of literature that addresses issues of the IMC concept can
be differentiated according to six central aspects of concept content (see Table II for an
overview): theoretical foundation, communication instruments, planning process,
organization/human resources, relationship orientation and inclusion of online
communication and social media. With respect to the aspect of theoretical foundation, the
IMC concepts are based on different theories, such as communications and social science
theories or organizational theory. The aspect of communication instruments considers which
media the corresponding IMC concept is focused on and which media it incorporates. The
aspect of a planning process indicates whether a concept is based on a comprehensive and
strategic planning process. Organizational and personnel aspects indicate whether the
approaches provide solutions to structural and/or process-oriented organizational and
personnel problems regarding IMC. Concepts which have a relationship orientation deal with
the creation and intensification of relationships with stakeholders under aspects of
integration. Whether the concepts include online communication and social media is
captured by the social media aspect (Bruhn, 2014).
From the presentation of the IMC concepts depicted in Table II, it becomes evident that the
concepts consider IMC from two different perspectives: marketing and management, and
impact[1].
Marketing and management-oriented IMC concepts regard IMC as a management and
designing task, whereby planning and implementation issues are at the core of these IMC
approaches (e.g. a management process as well as organizational and personnel aspects).
These concepts argue from an internal, company-directed perspective and suggest that
companies have to structure, consciously plan and gradually implement their
communication activities in a unified, consistent and orchestrated way. Examples of this
type of approach are the concepts of Caywood et al. (1991); Schultz et al. (1993); Zerfaß (1996);
Thorson and Moore (1996) and Kliatchko (2008). Other concepts in the marketing and
management perspective focus more on stakeholder relations and communication excellence
models, and regard IMC as the integration of marketing and public relations. Examples are
the concepts identified by Dozier et al. (1995) and Gronstedt and Thorson (1996).
In contrast, IMC concepts which focus on impact adopt an internal as well as external
perspective, and primarily deal with the impacts of IMC on customer behavior and company
success. In case of the uncontroversial success potential of IMC, it is surprising that only the three
German IMC concepts of Bruhn (2014); Esch (2011) and Kroeber-Riel (1993) explicitly integrate
impacts of IMC into their concepts[2]. However, only Bruhn’s (2014) concept unifies the marketing
and management, and the impact perspectives in a comprehensive IMC concept.
Irrespective of the different conceptual and theoretical streams, the concepts are capable
of being reinterpreted from different perspectives; they have undergone a development from
an inside-out-oriented IMC to an outside-in-oriented IMC.
51,3
EJM
468
Table II.
Existing IMC concepts
Inclusion of online
Organization/human Relationship communication and
Theoretical foundation Communication instruments Planning process resources orientation social media Country
Caywood et al. Marketing perspective Short-term company-based Development of an eight-step Suspension of Yes No USA
(1991) communication instruments management process different
Long-term brand-based communication
communication instruments departments
Bruhn (1997, 2014) Gestalt psychology Internal and external Integration of planning processes Project organization Yes Yes Germany
Business perspective communication instruments on company-and instrument level with interdisciplinary
of corporate by teams and steering
communication a Strategy board
Primarily management a Concept paper Process management
aspects and aspects of of integrated communication Appointment of a
organizational communications
structure manager
Marketing approach
Kroeber-Riel (1993) Organizational- and Primarily external No statements No statements No No Germany
impact-driven communication instruments
theoretical approach
Schultz et al. (1995) Business perspective Concentration on consumer- Development of a seven-step Communications-czar Yes No USA
of corporate focused communication process Establishment of a
communication instruments market-oriented
structure
Suspension of
middle-management
positions
Dozier et al. (1995) Organization-theoretic Advertising and public No statements Statements about the Yes No USA
approach relations public relation
Perspective of organization:
reference group Horizontal
management organization, matrix
Primarily organization
communications
approach
Marketing aspects
(restricted)
(continued)
Inclusion of online
Zerfaß (1996) Organization-theoretic Organizational Process with different stages: Cross-functional Partially Rudimentarily the Germany
approach communications Planning, implementation and planning teams, internet
Business management Public relations controlling human resources
perspective (One-sided) market management
communication
Gronstedt and Reference group Sending instruments Three planning steps: selection of Common Partially Rudimentarily the USA
Thorson (1996) management Receiving instruments the peer groups, selection of the organization of internet and
approach/Stakeholder- Interactive instruments optimal mix of sending marketing and public interactive media
Relations-Model instruments for each peer group, relations
Integration of integration of the instruments
marketing and public
relations
Thorson and Business perspective Advertising, public Development of a four-step No statements No Partially the USA
Moore (1996) of brand relations, promotions, direct management process internet and
communication marketing, packaging interactive media
design
Duncan and Business perspective No statements Identification of seven Objective: extension No No USA
Caywood (1996) of corporate “evolutionary” steps of IMC of cooperation to non-
communication communication
focused departments
Duncan and Brand communication Mass communication Process with different stages: Interdisciplinary Yes Partially the USA
Moriarty (1997) from a business Individual communication analysis, planning and brand equity team internet and
perspective Interactive communication controlling (IM-Audit) Marketing interactive media
Brand management communications team
Sirgy (1998) System theory No statements Development of a six-step No statements No Partially interactive USA
management process media
Schultz and Business perspective No statements Development of a four-step No statements Yes Partially the USA
Schultz (1998) of brand management process internet and
communication interactive media
(continued)
469
Table II.
communication
marketing
Integrated
51,3
EJM
470
Table II.
Inclusion of online
Esch (1999, 2011) Behavioral marketing Focus on external No statements No statements No No Germany
perspective communication, primarily
Involvement theory advertising
Imagery theory
Kliatchko (2005) Business perspective Internal and external Communication process No statements Yes Partially, by Southeast
of corporate communication instruments containing different stages such integration of the Asia
communication as acquisition of shareholder internet and
information, development of interactive media
communication messages,
measurement of communication
campaigns
Kliatchko (2008) Business perspective Internal and external Management process from a No statements Yes Partially, by Southeast
of corporate communication instruments stakeholder-oriented perspective, integration of the Asia
communication differentiated in a strategic and internet and
operational level interactive media
Changed orientation of IMC concepts Integrated
Inside-out orientation. The prevailing perspective of IMC is based on the inside-out view. marketing
This view is represented by the older IMC concepts which hold that IMC originates from the communication
company in such a way that the integrated communication activities are managed by the
company. That is, a company’s integration task is first to create the internal conditions (e.g.
planning, organizational structure, personnel, embodiment and integration of internal
communication activities) to lay the internal foundations for an efficient external integration 471
of communication. Then, the second integration task is to coordinate and align their external
communication activities to ensure that the company’s appearance is clear, cohesive and
comprehensible. This inside-out view refers to all communication efforts generated by the
company and addressed to all external stakeholders. Such a company-centered view has
the character of push communication because it implies that a company “pushes” its contents
to customers and thereby demotes the customer’s role to that of a passive communication
receiver and promotes the company’s role to that of content producer. As such, the company
has the authority to ensure message consistency, is in control of communications and thus
possesses communication sovereignty. For examples of this rationale, see the concepts of
Duncan and Caywood (1996); Caywood et al. (1991) and Schultz et al. (1993).
Outside-in orientation. In contrast to the company-oriented approach to IMC, more recent
concepts support a customer-oriented approach to IMC (Bruhn, 2014; Kliatchko, 2005, 2008).
Within the scope of this outside-in view, IMC is considered to be customer-centric in that a
company aligns all its communication activities with its customers and integrates its customers
into its communication. This view on IMC expands the direction of the relationship from
company to customer by adding a new direction from customer to company. Hence,
communication activities are initiated by customers and directed to the company. In this view,
customers actively search for the information they want and thus decide themselves when and
where they want to retrieve (or pull) contents from the company or interact with the company.
This view is therefore also referred to as pull communication. Moreover, this view also subsumes
the activities undertaken by the company to integrate the user-generated contents into its IMC
concept. Hence, IMC moves from telling and selling to listening and learning. By deploying
user-generated contents in social media as a feedback channel, the company learns more about
the meanings, needs and wants of their customers and can use this information as a basis for
planning and implementing its communication activities. Thus, this extended approach ensures
that both the company’s outgoing messages and its customers’ ingoing messages contribute to
the consistent appearance of the company’s communications. The aspect of meaning creation is
especially important here, because it is the customer who encodes the message and thereby
creates the meaning of all marketing and communication actions of the company.
When the outlined inside-out and outside-in perspectives interact, the communication
roles between the senders and the receivers are reversible and both parties communicate as
senders and receivers sequentially. In such a media landscape, companies no longer operate
in a centralized environment where they are the sole content producers and distributors;
rather, the social media give customers the power to decide what information they want to
receive from and what information they want to produce for the company and other
customers (Kimmel and Kitchen, 2014). The IMC concept of Bruhn (2014) ties in with the
latter aspect and thus extends the outside-in perspective by adding a new facet, the
interactions between customers (outside-out perspective). Such customer-to-customer
interactions are especially important in the era of social media. This includes that customers
generate their own content, make it available to other customers and exchange their own and
the company-generated content with other customers on social media platforms.
EJM As a consequence, this relatively new outside-in view requires a rather different view on
51,3 planning, developing and implementing IMC activities.
Discussion
To summarize, it can be noted that, besides the shortcoming of disregarding internal IMC
aspects, the existing IMC concepts do not discuss IMC with regard to the social media era in
472 any great depth. More precisely, most of the existing IMC concepts only regard IMC as a new
communication instrument that enriches the communication mix. They therefore fail to
address the fact that social media have structurally changed the communication marketplace
to such an extent that the sender–receiver perspective is no longer valid and senders and
receivers are no longer clearly defined, but can change indefinitely. Moreover, because the
existing IMC concepts do not consider the impact that these changes have on IMC, and
therefore do not integrate user-generated contents within their frameworks, these issues
remain an untapped resource. Such social media issues have only found their way into the
IMC concepts proposed by Kliatchko (2008) and Bruhn (2014). Nevertheless, some analyses
have investigated the role that the internet and interactive media (e.g. telephone, email) play
in achieving an efficient IMC, thereby forcing an interactive perspective on IMC (Kliatchko,
2005; Schultz and Schultz, 1998; Duncan and Moriarty, 1997). Combined with the growing
importance and increasing presence of social media, this prevailing research situation calls
for the implementation of a more customer-centric IMC (Finne and Grönroos, 2009; Mulhern,
2009). This is why the development of a new IMC concept has to be based on new approaches
and lines of thinking that take account of the changing conditions in the era of social media.
Framework conditions of customer-centric IMC

Procedure
We use a literature-based methodological approach that follows the logic shown in Figure 1.
First, we worked through the literature to ascertain the changed conditions on the market
Figure 1.
Framework conditions
of customer-centric
IMC
and the customer side to build the basis for deriving the challenges of IMC in the era of social Integrated
media. Second, we draw on the identified challenges to accentuate the principles of marketing
customer-centric IMC. Finally, these impulses and inspirations provide important
implementation issues for customer-centric IMC. To systematically discuss these
communication
implications, we develop an umbrella framework that orders and systematizes the IMC tasks
in the era of social media.
473
Changed conditions on the market and customer side

The outlined change in orientation of IMC concepts is largely caused by the changed
conditions on the market and customer side. Accordingly, IMC is fundamentally affected by
the interplay of the actual conditions in the media and communication markets and changing
customer behavior as a result of the emergence and growing importance of social media and
user-generated contents.
Media and communication market side. On the media and communication market side,
branding and communication activities face difficult conditions. The most crucial changes in
media markets occur with respect to the media offerings. The media landscape is characterized
by constant offerings of new forms of highly interactive social media and constant improvements
in technical infrastructure, which increase the intensity of competition, and impede differentiation
opportunities. New forms of media are interaction-based exchanges and communication
platforms, such as social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), Web radio, weblogs, online
communities and mobile media (e.g. Apps, QR codes). Especially the modern reception
technology (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) of mobile devices (smartphones,
PDAs, notebooks) ensures that customers can act in social media (e.g. by reading
company-driven content and/or by producing their own content) whenever and wherever they
want to (Mangold and Faulds, 2009; Schultz and Patti, 2009). The consequence of these increasing
interaction opportunities is a sheer unmanageable amount of contents being produced and made
available at all times and everywhere in social media by companies and customers (Chen et al.,
2015; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). For example, Facebook currently has over one billion active
daily users. The activities on this social network site are immense: every 60 s, there are 510,000
comments posted, 293,000 statuses updated and 136,000 photos uploaded (Noyes, 2015). What is
special about these company- and user-generated contents is that they are customized and
tailored to the heterogeneous needs and preferences of the different stakeholders (Zhu and Chen,
2015).
These conditions require intensive communication integration efforts by skimming all
the customized contents being produced as well as the interaction and therewith the
integration opportunities offered by social media. Given the growing importance of social
media, the new media forms partly replace, substitute or complement traditional,
company-driven communication instruments, to the extent that above-the-line
communication becoming obsolete owing to the growing importance of customized
relationship communication (Peltier et al., 2003; Finne and Grönroos, 2009).
As a consequence of the emergence of social media and the structural changes that go
along with it, a new space of communication emerges, the meaning space. This space is
totally independent of the influence of the company; i.e. the company has no means of control
over what takes place in this space. This is due to the fact that these media platforms are
initiated and managed by various stakeholders and are therefore non-company-driven.
However, so far, existing communication spaces have been characterized by direct versus
indirect communication, a relatively large degree of power and thus a high level of control
over communication. For example, within the scope of the instrumental space (e.g. direct
marketing, public relations and media advertising), companies have a large degree of power
EJM over their communication activities. This is because in this space, communication is
51,3 characterized as being one-way, processing from the company to its stakeholders. Hence, the
coordination of all communication activities is centrally located in the company. Moreover,
within the scope of the interaction space (e.g. sponsoring, personal communication, as well as
fairs and exhibitions), the focus is on the interactions between the company and its
stakeholders and on the interactions among the stakeholders themselves. The level of control
474 is moderate, because stakeholders are, in fact, empowered to produce their own content and
deliver it to the company; however, it is the company that defines, conceives and manages the
interactions that take place in this space.

Customer behavior side. On the customer behavior side, the needs structure of customers has
changed fundamentally. In the era of social media, the needs of many customers for social
orientation, self-portrayal, personal identity, entertainment, relationships and integration become
apparent (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004; Zolkepli and Kamarulzaman, 2015, 2015).
This need structure is accompanied by an increasingly interactive, mobile and
customized communication behavior conditioned by social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter)
and mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets; Shankar et al., 2010; Chu and Kim, 2011).
IMC faces a plethora of challenges as a result of these media and customer-behavior
conditions. These will be discussed as important future topics of IMC in the next sections.
New challenges of IMC

The changed conditions on the market and customer side pose new challenges for IMC.
Important challenges for IMC are the loss of control, content marketing, dialogue and
network communication and management of multiple stakeholders. Each challenge will be
discussed in turn.
Loss of control. One important challenge of IMC is the loss of control over corporate
communication. According to the outlined media- and customer-related developments,
customers now insist on being involved in the creation of communication by actively generating
their own communication contents (Kietzmann et al., 2011; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). As a
consequence of active customer contributions in the communication process, the volume of
communication and available content has increased drastically, resulting in the media landscape
becoming less transparent for companies (Ashley and Tuten, 2015). Because customers can
actively influence, shape and govern communication through their contributions in the
communication process and thereby acquire power, companies simultaneously lose sovereignty
over their communications. Companies can no longer govern when, where or how customers
express their opinions about the company and its products and brands and when, where or how
customers share company- and self-generated communication content. In this respect, the
challenge of IMC lies in ensuring a consistent and uniform communication appearance (e.g.
content and formal consistency) in the uncontrolled space of the virtual media landscape (Kitchen
and Schultz, 2009; Kliatchko, 2008; Gurau, 2008).
Content marketing. The loss of control and the immense flood of content highlight the
importance of implementing a comprehensive content-marketing strategy, which is another
important challenge facing IMC. To successfully assert themselves in the uncontrolled space
of social media, companies must have the capacity to provide customers with consistent
content that is relevant and useful to them and which exhibits a required standard of quality
(i.e. customized content tailored to the customers’ needs and preferences; Jefferson and
Tanton, 2013). To ensure this and to generate an added-value for customers, an IMC concept
has to ensure that companies consistently expand their content competence. This
necessitates the provision of appropriate technical features, an appealing information
presentation and easy access to information (Preece, 2001). Besides this, companies must be
able to react quickly, be flexible and also be receptive to user-generated contents (Lowry Integrated
et al., 2009; Peltier et al., 2003). marketing
Dialogue and network communication. An ever-growing offering of new media
technologies (e.g. social media and mobile devices) delivers alternative interaction
communication
opportunities that facilitate multi-party dialogues between companies and their stakeholders
(Mangold and Faulds, 2009). These dialogue and network communications pose new
strategic challenges for IMC. The inter-activity and mobility of today’s communication
media enable and encourage customers to become active producers of content, while 475
weakening corporate media control; at the same time, these new functionalities offer
companies opportunities to draw on this content at all times and engage in a direct personal
dialogue with their target group of stakeholders (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). To respond
adequately to customers’ preferences and wishes and to serve them individually, dialogue
and network communication instruments can be exploited. In view of these circumstances,
companies are encouraged to implement customized dialogue and network communication
to establish long-term, dialogic communication relationships with their multiple
stakeholders (Luck and Moffatt, 2009).
Management of multiple stakeholders. Tightly interwoven with dialogic and network
communication is the management of multiple stakeholders (e.g. customers, employees,
channel members, the public and suppliers). In this respect, IMC is faced with the challenge
of considering multiple parties in its communication work (Finne and Grönroos, 2009;
Duncan and Moriarty, 1997; Schultz et al., 2011). IMC’s task of communicating to all its
stakeholders and integrating their generated content into its strategies has the effect of
increasing the diversity of needs, interests and desires that need to be served. This
requirement for individualized communication and for the provision of customized
communication messages, in turn, enhance the complexity of IMC by impeding a uniform
and consistent communication (Mulhern, 2009). Hence, IMC faces the challenge of addressing
all the different values, needs, motivations and priorities of its stakeholders individually
while securing consistent and uniform communication with them across a variety of
communication channels. However, this balancing act also has to be tackled in the opposite
direction, from the stakeholders to the company. As a consequence, these multiple
interactions further increase the complexity of IMC, in that IMC has to establish
target-specificity while simultaneously ensuring that company-generated content is uniform
and consistent with the content generated by each stakeholder (stakeholder– company
interaction), and the content generated between the stakeholders (stakeholder–stakeholder
interaction). As already mentioned, although social media facilitate communication among
individual stakeholders and their individual addressing, they also exacerbate the problem of
loss of control, i.e. they weaken corporate communication control. Companies are unable to
control the content generated by their stakeholders, and can, at best, only influence it
marginally. Therefore, the active role of the stakeholders in IMC may increase the problem of
inconsistent messages and contradictions. These threats to the consistency and
controllability of IMC require a reinforced effort to coordinate communication activities by
consistently and individually addressing multiple stakeholders and by integrating them at
all levels of a company’s communication activities. Moreover, the overriding challenge is to
use stakeholder insights as the basis of the whole IMC planning process (Kliatchko, 2008;
Winer, 2009).
Principles of customer-centric IMC

The changed conditions on the market side and the customer side in the era of social media
fundamentally affect the IMC concept. To cope with the resulting challenges, IMC has to become
EJM customer-centric. As such, IMC requires important new, interrelated principles that need to be
51,3 anchored in marketing research and practice. Such principles of customer-centric IMC have to
take account of the shift from the prevailing “old world of communication” (Web 1.0) to a “new
world of communication”, beginning with the Web 2.0 and the corresponding structural changes
in communication with all market operators (e.g. customers, companies) involved.
In this respect, dialogic communication is crucially important. A one-voice
476 communication policy is therefore no longer sufficient to achieve an effective IMC that is also
customer-centric; today, IMC (i.e. customer-centric IMC) needs to be playful, interactive and
open to co-creation. In this respect, the integration of customers and their contents, meanings
and needs within IMC processes has become an essential success factor (Finne and Grönroos,
2009; Porcu et al., 2012). Companies therefore cannot perform their IMC activities without
integrating customers’ perceptions into their IMC planning and implementation process. As
a consequence, researchers and practitioners have to respond strategically to the changes in
the media markets and customer behavior and address the resulting challenges facing IMC
to develop a customer-centric IMC concept. This transition demands new thoughts on IMC
and breaking new ground in communications. To do this, a fundamental strategic rethinking
has to occur that provides indications on how to manage the discussed challenges of IMC.
The basis of such a rethinking process is the rejection of the instrumental view on IMC. The
rejection of the instrumental view on IMC means that the IMC concept, which has evolved
evolutionarily over the past two decades (Kitchen, 2005; Kliatchko, 2008; Schultz and Patti,
2009; Schultz and Schultz, 1998), now has to evolve structurally. Accordingly, the extensions
that IMC requires in the era of social media relate not only to its adaptations to innovative
communication instruments but more fundamentally to its conceptualization. This
rethinking has to be broad and consolidated in that it goes beyond just to finding ways in
which to integrate new media within the communication mix; rather, it has to go deeper and
affect all company levels (e.g. organizational structure, internal and external communication,
philosophy and objectives).
This involves refining IMC concepts which have lost their relevance with new valid IMC
concepts: For customer-centric IMC, it is therefore necessary to adopt relationship
orientation, content orientation and process orientation. These three central principles of
customer-centric IMC will be discussed below.
Relationship orientation. As pointed out earlier, the core of most IMC concepts is
relationship orientation. The relational approach of IMC is especially relevant to coping with
the challenge of managing multiple stakeholders and establishing customized dialogue and
network communication in the era of social media (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010; Vries et al.,
2012; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). A relationship orientation requires, on the one hand, that
new IMC concepts be developed which are able to address the communication and
interaction processes between multiple stakeholders. Thus, IMC in the era of social media
has to be relationship-oriented by directing a great deal of communication activities toward
maintaining and managing long-term relationships with all internal and external
stakeholders (Shin, 2013; Luck and Moffatt, 2009). On the other hand, such a relational,
stakeholder-oriented IMC approach requires the provision of customized dialogue and
network communications that evaluate customer insights as the basis for the whole IMC
planning process. In this respect, IMC needs to implement an adequate customer database for
generating information on actual customer behavior to drive its communication strategy
(Peltier et al., 2003; Mulhern, 2009). Accordingly, a relationship orientation is evident in its
capacity to realize and fulfill the customers’ expectations of the company– customer
relationship and the company’s communication activities. Although social media has greatly
advanced the availability of customer data (Chen et al., 2015), new efficient methods to
generate and prepare the data have to be developed. It is important to have access to such a Integrated
database which can provide the necessary information for designing communication marketing
activities that are tailored to individual stakeholders, their wants, desires and needs (Peltier
et al., 2003; Finne and Grönroos, 2009).
communication
Content orientation. Content orientation is crucial in handling the IMC challenge of content
marketing. An orientation toward contents is characterized by the idea of communication content
in the sense of story-telling. According to this approach concept, companies are viewed as
providers of messages, ideas, stories and topics that are relevant for customers, i.e. relevant in the 477
sense that customers have a personal interest in the communication content provided by the
company. Moreover, the content (i.e. messages, ideas, stories and topics) has to be prepared in a
way that induces customers to listen to it, to talk about it, to retell it and to develop it further
(Woodside et al., 2008; Granitz and Forman, 2015; Malthouse et al., 2013). Accordingly, the task of
IMC is no longer to promote the company’s products, brands and services in a consistent and
orchestrated manner, but to tell a story that forces the customer to actively participate in the
story-telling process.
According to such a content orientation, thinking in terms of communication contents
enables companies to take their customers on an eventful journey of discovery and attend to
them communicatively at all communication contact points to ensure an optimal degree of
communicative coordination. In this respect, the central premise of thinking in terms of
communication contents is it to give the stakeholders input impulses that channel their
thoughts and discussions. In consequence, a shift from thinking in terms of a communication
mix to thinking in terms of a content mix is observable. In other words, a movement from an
IMC concept that views companies as the sole message producers (inside-in and inside-out) to
a concept that views them as providers of stories that are personally relevant to their
customers so that their customers want to talk about the contents, and pursue them further
(outside-in and outside-out), occurs. These interactions can be mapped as a circular flow
(Figure 2). Hence, companies have still to determine the main communication issues by
Direct and Indirect

Feedback
Company-Driven
Communication Media
Communication
Communication Company-Generated Partner
Partner Contents (INSIDE-OUT)
Pool of Information and OUTSIDE-

INSIDE-IN Interaction Offerings OUT
User-Generated
Contents (OUTSIDE-IN) Stakeholder
Provider
User-Driven
Communication Media
Figure 2.
Direct and Indirect Circular flow of
Feedback customer-centric IMC
EJM defining key messages and thereby focusing the attention of their stakeholders on particular
51,3 issues and making them salient in their stakeholders’ minds (agenda setting). This structural
change in the conceptualization of IMC can be used successfully to achieve consistent
communication in the era of social media.
Process orientation. The previous discussions have illustrated that customer-centric IMC
needs to be procedural in nature. Process orientation focuses on internal processes as well as
478 on processes between a company’s communication activities and its customers.
Cross-functional processes. To implement an efficient IMC that ensures a consistent
appearance of companies and builds, manages and leverages strong stakeholder interaction
relationships, the necessary conditions need to be created. IMC is not the work of only one person;
rather, employees and other stakeholders play an active part in the IMC implementation process.
This approach therefore needs to implement internal processes that are capable of ensuring a
relational and customer-centric IMC by enabling a two-way communication process between the
company and its customers. Consequently, IMC has to solve problems of process-related
complexity, because implementing customer-centric IMC involves processes between multiple
parties (i.e. employees, customers, departments). Therefore, a central principle of IMC is to
manage processes between multiple internal and external parties entrusted with direct and
indirect IMC tasks. Cross-functional processes are therefore presently becoming increasingly
important (Luck and Moffatt, 2009; Shin, 2013; Luxton et al., 2015).
Management of communication contact points. A customer-centric IMC approach has to
view every interaction the stakeholders have with a company, its products and brands as a
specific communication contact point (Patrício et al., 2011; Shin, 2013). To cope with the
challenges of IMC (i.e. the loss of control, content marketing, dialogue and network
communication and the management of multiple stakeholders), it is important to manage
these communication contact points from a customer perspective by using each of them as a
message delivery channel (Shimp and Andrews, 2013; Tax et al., 2013). Due to the relatively
unstructured and circular communication processes in social media, this management
requires some sort of mental structures. A first possible such structure is our idea of a
customer communication journey. This idea requires that IMC is orientated by the “customer
journey”, i.e. by the communication contact points along the purchase process, to
communicatively accompany the customer on his or her journey. In keeping with the credo
that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, this means that the added value of IMC
does not stem from a simple addition of all communication activities, but that it stems from
their harmonious interplay. This approach concept requires that IMC focuses on the
communicative coordination of all communication contact points. Accordingly, new
thoughts on IMC should view the customer communication journey as IMC’s navigation
system.
Intertwined with the customer communication journey is our idea of a customer
communication funnel, a second important mental structure for managing communication
contact points in the era of social media. The customer communication funnel is inspired by
the idea of the purchase funnel (Hoban and Bucklin, 2015; Briggs et al., 2005). The customer
communication funnel starts on an aggregated level and then becomes more specific. The
funnel illustrates that, at the beginning of the purchase process, customers are aware of all
the media that are available to them (e.g. newspaper, radio, TV, internet). As the purchase
process progresses, it becomes evident that only some customers will select from the
available media to gathering information about a company and/or a specific product.
However, only a small fraction of these customers reach the end of this purchase process, i.e.
in purchasing the product. Each stage of the funnel (e.g. awareness, media use, purchase)
constitutes a different communication contact point. In managing each of these
communication contact points and observing the behavior of customers at each of these Integrated
points, companies are able to identify reasons for possible aborted or interrupted marketing
purchase processes, which in turn give them an indication about where communication
activities have to be deployed. In other words, orienting IMC toward a communication funnel
communication
strategy helps management to identify relevant communication drivers.
Although the customer communication journey and the customer communication funnel
might suggest a sequential order, they do not imply linear processes; rather, they are mental
structures that serve to direct IMC activities in the era of social media to the different 479
communication contact points. In doing so, they provide approaches for managing IMC in the
relatively unstructured and circular communication environment of social media. Accordingly,
orienting IMC toward the customer communication journey and the customer communication
funnel aims to pick up the customers at the stage of purchase where they currently are and to
communicatively accompany customers on their journey until their communication needs are
satisfied. In other words, the aim is it to communicatively accompany customers on their
individual journey and not to send them on or push them through a prescribed journey. Hence, the
proposed mental structures are not static but flexible and iterative in nature.
Discussion
What is new about customer-centric IMC is that it is no longer structured according to
different communication instruments, but according to relationships, contents and
processes. The three principles of relationship orientation, content orientation and process
orientation provide the basis for a customer-centric view on IMC. In this respect, the
principles succeed in the balancing act between the inside-out perspective (i.e.
communication sovereignty) and the outside-in perspective (i.e. integration of user-generated
content), wherefore these principles are well-suited in dealing with the challenges that IMC
faces in the era of social media. In other words, they juxtapose the previously rigid
unidirectional view of top-down communication with the contemporary view of an
interactive vertical and lateral negotiation network.
Accordingly, thinking in the mindset of the three principles of customer-centric IMC
requires that companies observe the communication activities of their stakeholders on social
media platforms (e.g. feedback, user-generated contents) and integrate them into their IMC
activities. This will provide them with the necessary information to establish a
target-specific, relationship-oriented communication with multiple stakeholders.
Nevertheless, by arguing that companies have to cope with a balancing act between
producing their own content and integrating user-generated communication content, the
principles suggest that companies will not be overly driven by user-generated contents and
that they will not totally lose sight of their communication sovereignty. The principles
therefore recommend that, as far as possible, companies should still hold a tight control on
managing most of their communication activities. This suggests that companies have to
deliver relevant contents to their customers, which stimulate customers to adopt these
contents and base their own contents on them.
Implementation issues for customer-centric IMC

The principles discussed provide important implementation issues for customer-centric IMC and
demand a new structure of IMC. Hence, to establish an implementation of and to provide a
common structure for IMC in the era of social media, a comprehensive, umbrella framework is
necessary that orders and systematizes the IMC tasks derived from the principles of
customer-centric IMC. In this section, such an implementation framework is proposed (Figure 3).
From the previous discussions, it follows that IMC’s basic premise is that, although new
approaches to IMC in the era of social media are necessary, the customer centricity has to
EJM User Generated Contents
51,3 Communication
Goals
Communication
Messages
Communication
Instruments
New Integration
Structure
Co-Creation, Co-Production
480 Hierarchy of Goals Hierarchy of Messages Hierarchy of Instruments

Strategic Positioning Key Message Key Instrument, Corporate Design

New Communication
Target Goals Core Messages Specified Instruments Order
Individual Communication Goals Individual Statements Single Medium or Activity
Figure 3. Organizational Requirements

Implementation Customer-Centered
New Organizational
Hierarchical Process
framework of Despecialization
Arrangements Organization
Teamwork Organizational Structure
Structure
customer-centric IMC
ultimately be harmonized with the objectives of the brand communication as well as with the
strategic objectives and positioning of a company. Consequently, these aspects are still
crucial to the company’s identity and its communication success. Given that these criteria are
protected, adaptations of the IMC concept due to the active role of the stakeholders can be
appraised and integrated. Therefore, the company has to decide, based on customer insights,
about the communicative parameters (i.e. goals, messages and instruments). How this could
be accomplished will be discussed in the next sections.
New communication order. The new communication order of IMC arranges IMC tasks with
respect to goals, messages and instruments in terms of a strategic hierarchy and differentiates
between a horizontal and a vertical order (Bruhn, 2008, 1997; Figure 4). The vertical order refers
to the degree of specificity within the hierarchy of communication goals, messages and
instruments. The underlying idea of such a hierarchical arrangement of IMC tasks is the process
of “down drilling”. This means that the lower, more operative levels (specific communication) are
deduced from the higher, more strategic levels (overall communication). On the strategic level, no
differentiation is made, such that the IMC activities are embedded in the overall goals, values,
mission and strategic positioning of a company to ensure communication consistency and are
thus valid for the company’s overall communication. On the next lower level, the strategic content
is concretized with respect to the target groups to ensure an optimal level of target-specific
communication. The lowest level in the vertical structure differentiates the communication
contents according to communication contacts, where different communication instruments have
the function of distributing the contents. Within this vertical order, the goals, messages and
instruments are arranged hierarchically.
Within the hierarchy of goals, a system of communication goals is established. This hierarchy
aims to express the strategic positioning as the primary goals and thus the starting point for all
IMC activities in concrete terms. The first concretization of the strategic positioning is made
through the target goals which are differentiated according to the company’s different target
groups. The second concretization is made by determining the individual communication goals
that are located at the level of single communication activities or contacts and prescribing clearly
measurable goals. These goals help to concretize and achieve the target goals through the use of
various communication instruments.
Hierarchy of Goals Hierarchy of Messages Hierarchy of Instruments Integrated
Strategic
Strategic Key Message Key Instrument and marketing
Planning
Positioning Corporate Design
communication
(e.g.: We are innovative, (e.g.; Innovation for you) (e.g.: Media Advertising)
Overall
dynamic, and customer-oriented,
Communication
and provide high-quality
solutions for demanding
customers)
481
Specified
Target Goals Core Messages
Instruments
(e.g.: Enhancement of (e.g.: We actually integrate (e.g.: Sponsoring,
awareness within the target our customers into the Direct Marketing) Target Groups
group „young adults“) new product development
processes)
Individual
Communication Individual Single Medium
Goals Statements or Activity
Communication
Contacts Figure 4.
(e.g.: 10 percent enhancement (e.g.: We obtain and (e.g.: Posters, Flyers,
of awareness within the target integrate new product Newsletters, Videos) New communication
Operative group „young adults“ by the ideas of our customers
Implementation
order of
presence on Facebook within through our idea creation
the next two years) platform “ideas-on”) customer-centric IMC
Within the hierarchy of messages, a system of statements and arguments is devised to harmonize
and coordinate the communication contents. From the key message, which is a general and
abstract statement about the company (e.g. a claim or slogan), the core messages are derived. The
latter aim to translate the key message into a more specific language for the stakeholders by
putting the key message in concrete terms, where each target is a particular stakeholder group.
The most substantial concretization is achieved with the individual statements. These statements
deliver transparent and traceable proofs and arguments for the core messages.
To establish a coordinated integrated approach, in addition to defining and coordinating
goals and messages, it is essential to define the set of instruments that will be used and
determine their functions. The hierarchy of instruments therefore specifies and coordinates
the heterogeneous communication instruments and tools, as well as their interplay.
Moreover, this hierarchy specifies the function which each instrument serves with regard to
specific stakeholders and the underlying targets. Located at the top of this hierarchy are the
key instruments of strategic importance. These are fixed within the strategic concept of a
company’s communications and have the task of achieving the strategic positioning goal.
The role as promoters of the key message and the independent contribution to the realization
of communication goals is set out for the other communication instruments.
In contrast to the outlined vertical order, the horizontal order refers to the relationships
between the different hierarchies of goals, messages and instruments. For example, on the
strategic order, the key message is implemented through the strategic positioning, which is
in turn implemented through the key instruments and corporate design.
New integration structure. Social media offer companies many opportunities for customer
integration (Mulhern, 2009). To adapt to this new open market environment, IMC has to
ensure that a target-specific communication is established, in addition to the more
company-driven integration of goals, messages and instruments, by applying the new tool of
customer integration. Customer integration is viewed as a form of communication value
co-creation (Edvardsson et al., 2012), such that customers are involved in or totally take over
activities that were previously part of the company’s field of activities. This means that
EJM customers can be integrated into a variety of different fields of IMC activities. To take
51,3 account of the comprehensive character of customer-centric IMC, it is important to empower
stakeholders to participate in all stages of the IMC process (i.e. the formulation of the
strategic positioning, planning and implementation phases). From existing types of
customer integration (Moeller, 2008; Rese et al., 2015; Schreier and Prügl, 2008), the following
types of customer integration along the communication production process are regarded as
482 relevant for customer integration in the context of customer-centric IMC. In the
communication development stage, co-creation is important. This can, for example, be
achieved using an idea competition, whereby the customers’ own best ideas are selected and
integrated into the ideation process for a company’s targeted objectives (e.g. strategic
positioning), for their messages (e.g. key message) or for their instrumental activities (e.g.
advertising campaigns). Moreover, to derive innovative communication concepts and
campaigns, companies can invite their lead users to participate in workshops with the
company’s personnel. The communication production stage includes a more concrete form of
customer integration, because it goes beyond the communication planning and development
stage by integrating customers into the production of communication activities
(co-production). For example, customers can be invited to produce their own communication
campaigns (e.g. a campaign video). During and after consumption, the integration of the
user’s own content about a company’s communication appearance (e.g. experiences,
opinions, recommendations, suggestions) generated in social media (e.g. social networks,
brand communities) into a company’s communication activities is important.
New organizational structure. As the previous discussions have demonstrated, the
internal conditions for an external successful and efficient IMC need to be established first.
With respect to customer-centric IMC, it is necessary that the character of this new form of
IMC is reflected in the organizational structure of a company. In other words, the
organizational structure has to meet the requirements for customer-centric IMC. In this
respect, the previously discussed situation of IMC in the era of social media provides
indications for the nature of such an organizational structure. Thus, requirements can be, on
the one hand, tangential to internal issues. Then, they refer to the securing of an optimal
degree of differentiation and formalization, and to the realization of a despecialization and of
a process orientation. It is therefore important to successfully implement customer-centric
IMC that all departments which have IMC responsibilities, especially the classical
communication departments, cooperate more, merge to a greater extent and are involved in
the IMC activities from the beginning, so that IMC is planned down-up, and not top-down. On
the other hand, such requirements can be tangential to the relationships between internal and
external issues, capturing aspects such as the establishment of an open communication with
processes that enable exchanges between multiple internal and external parties, the
integration of user-generated contents into a company’s communication activities, the
provision of feedback loops and, last but not least, the creation of an environment of
cooperation, co-creation and collaboration between multiple internal and external
stakeholders and departments (Gronstedt and Thorson, 1996; Shin, 2013).
According to these organizational requirements of customer-centric IMC, a new
organizational environment needs to be created. Besides the “traditional” organizational
environment of IMC, it is necessary to implement a customer-centered organizational
environment. So far, organizational structures of an effective and systematic implementation
of IMC include despecialization, hierarchical arrangements, process organization and
teamwork. In the era of social media, this traditional organizational environment of IMC
needs to be enriched by a customer-centered organizational structure:
• Despecialization: Because many heterogeneous departments are involved in the IMC Integrated
processes, the establishment of a required degree of integration through marketing
despecialization and hierarchical structuring is important. With respect to the first
organizational integration lever, the communicative fields of responsibility and
communication
discretionary authority need to be defined. Thereby, decisions have to be made with
respect to the degree of specialization, which significantly influences the degree of
integration. To establish an optimal degree of integration, a consolidation of the
communication activities through despecialization is recommended. For example, this 483
means that the tasks of IMC should not be defined according to different
communication instruments, but according to specific characteristics of IMC tasks. As
a consequence, communication instruments and tasks should be consolidated, for
example, by establishing a department responsible for IMC.
• Hierarchical arrangements: With respect to the second organizational integration
lever, a hierarchical structuring ensures an optimal degree of integration. However, a
hierarchical organizational arrangement is affiliated with integration barriers, such as
the “not-invented-here-syndrome”, “turf battles”, time losses due to long and
formalized communication routes, the absence of direct contact between the involved
departments at different hierarchical levels and slower adaptation to changes in the
media markets (e.g. the emergence of social media; Kitchen et al., 2008; Kliatchko and
Schultz, 2014). The result is that there is a greater need for coordination and
cooperation to ensure that a cross-functional, open communication with a strong focus
on team orientation increasingly becomes important strategic concerns. Because the
matrix organization gears toward team-oriented, cross-functional cooperation and
horizontal processes, and ensures a high degree of flexibility and interconnectedness
between the different parties which have communication responsibilities, it is an
important organizational structure that assists in implementing IMC (Shin, 2013).
• Process organization: To respond to this need for coordination and the organizational
complexity of IMC, process organization is crucial. Such organization ensures the
cross-functional optimization of communication processes by intensively focusing on
the IMC workflows, by identifying the critical coordination between the departments
entrusted with IMC tasks and by developing adequate coordination mechanisms (e.g.
a communications czar or a brand equity team) to reduce complexity in advance
(Schultz et al., 1993; Duncan and Moriarty, 1997).
• Teamwork: From the previous context, it follows that, to achieve effective IMC,
coordination processes need to be developed that ensure cooperation between the
employees involved in the IMC work. The integration through team orientation ties in
with this by institutionalizing teams and entrusting them with IMC subtasks. For
example, teams could be composed of representatives from different communication
departments to create a communication campaign for the promotion of a new product
based on predefined IMC goals and communication messages. The participative
character of teams contributes positively to an effective IMC by increasing employees’
creativity, their own initiative, their motivation and their cooperative commitment/
will (Barker and Angelopulo, 2006).
• Customer-centered organizational structure: The four outlined organizational
elements that are applied in the “traditional” form of IMC also remain important
concerns for customer-centric IMC, but need to be enriched by the outlined specific
organizational requirements for customer-centric IMC; accordingly, a
customer-centric organizational structure that recognizes and complies with the
EJM requirements of customer-centric IMC has to secure an optimal degree of
51,3 differentiation and formalization, undertake a despecialization and establish an open
communication with processes that enable exchanges and the integration of
user-generated content into a company’s communication activities. Moreover, such an
organizational structure has to enable feedback loops; has to create an environment
characterized by cooperation, co-creation, and collaboration between multiple internal
484 and external stakeholders and departments; and has to implement a process
orientation. For this purpose, the network organization is suitable, because it is
organized around the needs of the customers and the market opportunities to provide
optimal solutions. Moreover, it consists of interdependent, task and capability-based
coalitions between different organizational units of a company and is thus focused on
horizontal processes and the collaboration between cross-functional teams (Gronstedt
and Thorson, 1996; Shin, 2013).
Limitations, summary and discussions

Due to the conceptual nature of the paper and because it is the first to comprehensively
discuss the IMC concept in the context of social media, the paper has to be viewed as basic
research that has some substantial limitations. The IMC concept is much more complex than
it seems at first sight. The embodiment of the IMC concept, therefore, strongly depends on a
variety of internal and external factors (e.g. industry, size of the company, competitive
environment, heterogeneity of the product mix, number of communication departments). To
reduce complexity and to develop a manageable framework that provides new insights into
the IMC concept in the context of social media, we ignored such factors in our framework.
Hence, the paper draws an incomplete and simplified picture of the framework conditions of
customer-centric IMC. It should also be critically noted that, although the paper discussed
important issues of customer-centric IMC in a structured manner, it is more a conglomeration
of meaningful ideas about how the concept of IMC has changed or has to change in the era of
social media. Each of these ideas needs more in-depth conceptual and empirical exploration.
Despite these limitations, the paper provides substantial insights and thought-provoking
impulses for the current IMC debate that delineate important trends in the IMC concept. Overall,
we have shown that IMC plays an ever more prominent role in the era of social media. To
demonstrate this, the major changes in the IMC concept determined by the structural changes of
the media landscape are identified. Important issues which are relevant for a better
understanding of the IMC concept in the context of social media are discussed. An important
finding of the paper is that the identified changes have substantially altered the demand and
supply of communication, with important implications for IMC. Especially, the emergence and
growing importance of new media (e.g. social networks, mobile media) and the resulting increase
in interactive and mobile communication behavior calls for a rethinking of the IMC concept. In
existing IMC concepts, this rethinking was peripherally stimulated, suggesting a movement from
an inside-out- to an outside-in-oriented IMC. However, the influence of customer-to-customer
interactions on IMC has, so far, not been taken into consideration.
Driven and inspired by these circumstances of and substantial changes in the media
landscape and the IMC concept, we have identified central challenges of IMC in the era of
social media (i.e. customer-centric IMC). Due to the growing power of customers, companies
are losing more and more control over their communications. This is particularly
problematic for IMC’s strategic task to establish consistent communication across all
communication contact points and stakeholders. Therefore, it has to be recognized that each
stakeholder must be heard and that the connectivity across stakeholders offers numerous
opportunities for improving the efficiency of IMC (Mulhern, 2009). Thus, managing the
company’s partial loss of control over communications, providing customers with relevant Integrated
and specific content they want to deal with (content marketing) and managing consistent marketing
interactions with all stakeholders (dialogue and network communications, the management
of multiple stakeholders) are identified as being central challenges of customer-centric IMC.
communication
It is then highlighted that these challenges of IMC give indications for the principles of
customer-centric IMC (i.e. relationship orientation, content orientation and process orientation).
IMC therefore has a number of tasks: It not only has to deal with the integration of new
communication instruments, but it must also manage and affect all levels of the company’s 485
organization (e.g. organizational structure, philosophy) as well as all communication contact

points, it must become process and relationship-oriented and target-specific and it must provide
customers with relevant content that they will wish to adopt and process further.
Besides approaching IMC from a customer-centered view by discussing its challenges and
principles in the era of social media, we also discussed implementation issues for customer-centric
IMC. For this purpose, we developed a comprehensive, overriding implementation framework.
With respect to a new communication order, this framework suggests a hierarchization of goals,
messages and instruments. With respect to a new integration structure, the framework proposes
that customers need to be integrated into all stages of the IMC process (i.e. planning and
implementation). With respect to a new organizational structure, the framework advises a
customer-centered organizational structure that enables open communication and co-operations
within a company, between the company and its stakeholders and among the stakeholders
themselves (e.g. matrix and/or network organization). Moreover, the framework recommends
that such an organizational structure has to establish integration through despecialization,
process organization and teamwork.
Based on our insights into customer-centric IMC, we expect that the IMC concept will
remain basically unchanged in the future. This does not imply, however, that IMC will be
static; rather, it implies that the basic features of the IMC concept will persist and that some
adjustments to the IMC concept are necessary such that it is able to adapt flexibly to the
changed conditions on the media and communication markets (e.g. through relationship
orientation, content orientation and process orientation). Accordingly, further developments
of IMC in the context of social media will be characterized by a balancing act between a
company’s own branding activities and the integration of customer-centered issues. In other
words, IMC is and will continue to be a balancing act between company strategies that aim
to cement its communication goals (i.e. clear strategic positioning) and those that aim to
make them more fluid (i.e. changes in communication goals and activities due to the
integration of stakeholders).
Notes
1. However, it is worth noting that the categorization of the IMC concepts is not without overlaps.
2. Of course, some studies have analyzed customer and company-related consequences of IMC (Reid
(2003); Luxton et al. (2015); Reid (2005); Mihart (2012)), but without explicitly integrating such
aspects into a comprehensive IMC concept.
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About the authors

Prof Dr Dr h.c. Manfred Bruhn is Full Professor for Marketing and Management at the Faculty of
Business and Economics, University of Basel, Switzerland.
Stefanie Schnebelen is a PhD student in Marketing and Management at the Faculty of Business and
Economics, University of Basel, Switzerland. Stefanie Schnebelen is the corresponding author and can
be contacted at: stefanie.schnebelen@unibas.ch
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Received 30 August 2015 Manfred Bruhn and Stefanie Schnebelen

hitherto one-way communication: multi-way communication. As a consequence, the focus shifts

The evolving concept of integrated marketing communication

Framework conditions of customer-centric IMC

Changed conditions on the market and customer side

interactions that take place in this space.

New challenges of IMC

Principles of customer-centric IMC

Direct and Indirect

Pool of Information and OUTSIDE-

Implementation issues for customer-centric IMC

480 Hierarchy of Goals Hierarchy of Messages Hierarchy of Instruments

Strategic Positioning Key Message Key Instrument, Corporate Design

Figure 3. Organizational Requirements

Limitations, summary and discussions

organization (e.g. organizational structure, philosophy) as well as all communication contact

About the authors

1. Daina Šķiltere, Santa Bormane. 2018. Integrated Marketing Communication as a Business

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