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Public relations...integration...marketing...advertising...How do these relate? The debate goes on, as it has for the last five years or so, with arguments about silos, prisoners of professionalism, and marketing imperialism. The discussion has focused on what marketing has learned (or borrowed) from PR as well as who should lead and who follows and whether PR is being subsumed under marketing. These discussions are not only becoming boring, they are counterproductive.
What has been missing in this discussion is a view of what integrated marketing communication (or integrated communication, total communication, etc.) can bring to public relations and how public relations practitioners can use IMC to develop more effective and efficient programming.
AS IMC has evolved during the 1990s, it has developed its own approach to holistic communication. It is not just marketing communication revised with warmed over PR concepts like relationships and stakeholders. Something new and different is growing from the amalgamation of public relations, marketing, advertising, and promotion, and this new tree is becoming identifiable as a separate species with its own theories and practices.
The University of Colorado, for example, has one of the first two IMC graduate programs in the U.S. A number of models, which are being developed there by program director Tom Duncan and his faculty, help to explain IMC and move forward both theory development and practical application. Of particular interest to public relations practitioners are Duncan's IMC Message Typology, the IMC Synergy Model, his approach to zero-based planning, and the IMC Audit. These theories and practices should be of interest to most public relations practitioners and they should be of particular concern to corporate communication managers.
IMC MESSAGE TYPOLOGY
The IMC Message Typology is a model of the different types of messages communicated by an organization. Some elements of the typology reflect conventional PR viewpoints; others are new; but when you analyze the whole typology, you can see an entirely new way of approaching corporate communication.
A totally integrated communication program accounts for all types of messages delivered by an organization at every point where a stakeholder comes in contact with the company. Although some contact points just happen--you go into a store and see a package on the shelf or you see a company's truck on the street--others...