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In 2004, when Kitchen et al. (2004) stated, “Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is perfectly poised at the transition from an industrial to an information-driven society”, practitioners and academics could only have dreamed about the advances in technology and the impact on marketing communication over the following decade. It is interesting therefore to reflect back on what change has occurred and chart the impact of this digital disruption on IMC education.
Digital disruption has seen a shift in how organisations conduct business on every level (Clift, 2014). The convergence of the internet, mobile devices and traditional media channels has changed the dialogic way that marketers communicate and engage with, and understand their customers (Belch et al., 2014). Advances in analytics allow marketers to track the customer journey, driving insights and building relationships and reputation (Leeflang et al., 2014). As a consequence of this digital disruption, many now see integration as more important than ever before (Kliatchko and Schultz, 2014).
As educators, we would like to feel we played some small part in this seismic shift towards a more integrated mindset. Has, for example, the lack of top management support, reported as one of the earliest obstacles to IMC, been addressed through educational efforts across the past two decades? Are industry practitioners and academics more aligned in their efforts towards strategic integration, and is research now informing practice? Has IMC education been a lever of transformation? Or are we still fighting over whether IMC should be in arts or business?
The purpose of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art assessment of IMC education. In doing so, it replicates and extends Kerr’s 2009 study of IMC education. By involving the world’s leaders in IMC education, some of whom comprised the original 2009 panel, this research explores the same questions about IMC’s place in the university, its branding, its curriculum, its challenges, its impact on practice and its future. It also seeks to include Kitchen et al.’s (2004) notion of a transformation to an information-driven society, more recently manifest as digital disruption, by examining the inclusion of digital and its impact on IMC education.
This study is important because if IMC is to thrive in this digital disruption, we need the right education for the...