เส้นทางแห่งบูรณาการศาสตร์: การเชื่อมโยงแนวคิดการสื่อสารการ ตลาดแบบผสมผสานกับแนวคิดการตรวจสอบสู่การพัฒนาเครื่องมือ ตรวจสอบการสื่อสารการตลาดแบบผสมผสาน

Abstract

For over 30

years, marketers and practitioners of advertising, public relations,
or marketing communications have adopted the concept of integrated
marketing communications, recognized as IMC. However, according to previous
recent research studies, results showed that most practitioners still lack true
understanding of the concept. They have focused only on integration among
different marketing communications tools. Nevertheless, IMC has been developed to embrace internal integration. Therefore, this issue has raised a question that, forcompanies that have already implemented IMC, to what extent their marketing communications process is integrated. This has inspired the authors to develop an audit tool to assess the overall level of integration achieved by an organization. Because the topic involves audit, it is essential to comprehensively study this concept. Basic principles underlying the concept could be used as a guideline for developing an IMC scale. This article, therefore, aims to review conceptual backgrounds of the three related concepts; integrated marketing communications,audit, and integrated marketing communications audit. Moreover, this article also proposes a definition of IMC audit, its objective and its criteria developed from the aforementioned concepts for future development of an IMC audit.