Overview
This course introduces students to integrated marketing communications (IMC) for the purposes of building, maintaining, and leveraging their franchises’ brand equity. The goal of IMC is to ensure consistency in the communication of the brand across all media and platforms. It brings together advertising, promotion, communications, public relations, social media, and sales in order to enhance the communication of the franchise’s primary and secondary brands through synergy and complementarity.
Toward this end, this course teaches students to critically assess the uses, benefits, and shortcomings of the available media channels. It explains how to identify market segments and stakeholders and incorporate their needs into marketing campaigns.
Students learn about the importance of measuring communications effectiveness and how this can be accomplished. They learn how to coordinate and manage multi-disciplinary teams by means of clearly defined objectives and strategies.
Upon completion of this course students should be capable of planning integrated marketing campaigns capable of successfully achieving measurable objectives.
Outline
The course is divided into eight parts, as follows:
| Week | Topic |
| 1 | Understanding the Integrated Marketing Communications Mix |
| 2 | IMC Strategic Planning and Branding Issues |
| 3 | Marketing Communication Planning |
| 4 | Online and Interactive Communications |
| 5 | Planning for Integrated Marketing |
| 6 | Experiential Marketing, Events, and Sponsorships |
| 7 | Personal Selling |
| 8 | Evaluating Marketing Communications Programs |
Objectives
By the end of this course, students should be able to do the following:
- Apply the key terms, definitions, and concepts used in integrated marketing communications.
- Conduct and evaluate marketing research and apply these findings to develop competitive and positioning strategies to specific target audience(s) for an IMC campaign plan for a hockey club.
- Critically evaluate various media channels and determine their uses, benefits and drawbacks.
- Select suitable outlets and proper message format for media relations.
- Understand how brands are perpetuated, enhanced, and damaged in various media.
- Analyze the various stakeholders in the marketplace and how to integrate their needs into a campaign.
- Craft a range of communications that serve target audiences in commercial and social campaigns.
- Distinguish between marketing rules, conventions, etiquette, ethics, and best practices.
- Coordinate multi-disciplinary teams to agree on marketing objectives and strategies.
- Plan an integrated marketing campaign to achieve measurable objectives.
- Measure and evaluate the communications effects and results of an IMC campaign to determine its effectiveness.
- Apply ethical principles to effective marketing communications and public relations practices.
Evaluation
To receive a passing grade in this course, students must meet these minimum standards:
- receive a minimum of 60% on the participation component; and
- receive an average grade of 60% over all course components.
Marks for this course will be distributed as follows:
| Activity | Weight |
| Participation in the Discussion Application | 30% |
| Assignment 1: Franchise Marcom Analysis | 35% |
| Assignment 2: Franchise Promotion | 35% |
| Total | 100% |
$extra
Materials
Tuckwell, K. J. (2018). Integrated marketing communications (5th ed.). Don Mills, Canada: Pearson.
Additional readings are provided in the course’s Digital Reading Room.