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Just doing it: theorising integrated marketing communications (IMC) practices

Mart Ots (Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden)
Gergely Nyilasy (Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia)

European Journal of Marketing

ISSN: 0309-0566

Article publication date: 10 April 2017

13328

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to elaborate on the concept of “integrated marketing communication (IMC) practice” and provide an empirical exposition of how integration is enacted in the lifeworlds of marketing practitioners, drawing from the “practice turn” in management studies. Although IMC is a well-known conceptual idea in academia, there is insufficient theorisation of what it means “to do” IMC. Despite broad acceptance for IMC, there has been scant application of available organisational and sociological theories to illuminate actual IMC practices in the field.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper introduces practice theory as a lens through which to study and analyse IMC practices. Using qualitative coding and interpretative analysis, the framework was operationalised and applied to a two-year organisational ethnography encompassing IMC planning activities in at a leading Swedish retailer.

Findings

Findings demonstrate how practitioners develop explicit and implicit strategies to enact strategic integration. The study conceptualises IMC as a set of interrelated practices, or routinised behaviours, which are repeated and organised by some social or formal rules and conventions. In the ethnographic context of the study, “IMC as practice” is exhibited in the forms of routines, material set-ups, rules and procedures, cultural templates and teleoaffective structures.

Originality/value

The paper proposes a novel set of theoretical and methodological tools that can be used to understand how IMC lives as a set of practices inside organisations. It specifically conceptualises the link between mental and objectified, materialised and routinised activities that has previously been escaping the sphere of theorisation. By creating language and tools to capture hitherto unmodellable phenomena, the paper opens many new avenues for future research.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge that this research was conducted with financial support from the Carl-Olof & Jenz Hamrin Foundation and the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council.

Citation

Ots, M. and Nyilasy, G. (2017), "Just doing it: theorising integrated marketing communications (IMC) practices", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 51 No. 3, pp. 490-510. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-08-2015-0595

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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