412 The Marketing Book
responsible for the executions of all or most
of the communications functions.
The client determines overall strategies and
assigns individual functions to individual
agencies, but requires that all of these
suppliers stay in touch with each other.
The client alone determines overall strategies,
then each communications function is executed
by a different agency.
Grein and Gould (1996) identify five factors
which, they suggest, impact on the organiza-
tional dimensions and affect its effective
implementation:
1 Inter-office co-ordination.
2 Co-ordination of promotional disciplines
across country offices.
3 The degree of centralization.
4 The frequency of inter-office communication.
5 The use of information technology.
Jeans (1998) argues that the most likely route to
achieving IMC is in team building, rather than
any hierarchical or matrix method of control.
Since the necessary practitioner skills are
unlikely to be embodied in any single individ-
ual, a team of people will be essential to
provide the necessary inputs.
A study by McArthur and Griffin (1997)
demonstrated the extent to which marketing
organizations perceived integration to have
been fulfilled. Almost half of the companies
surveyed indicated that all marketing commu-
nications activities of their companies were co-
ordinated either by a single person or as a result
of some reporting relationship. A further quar-
ter co-ordinated the majority of their marketing
communications programmes. Interestingly,
and confirming the results of other studies, the
areas of business which indicated the highest
level of co-ordination of activities were retail
and business-to-business.
The study identified a series of ‘incon-
sistencies’ in the sourcing of activities across the
different business types. Their study revealed,
for example, that consumer marketers tended
to use external suppliers for creative input
more extensively than others. The business-to-
business sector relied more heavily on their
advertising agencies for all communications
activities. Retailer marketers were significantly
more prone to source activities in-house.
There are sound historical reasons for these
differences in practice sometimes, but not
always, related to the level of marketing com-
munications expenditures within specific cate-
gories. Within the consumer sector, budgets
tend to be large and activities more extensive.
Inevitably, companies involved with these pro-
grammes seek high levels of expertise within
the respective fields and source suppliers who,
in the main, have a demonstrable track record
of being able to deal with the market sector.
Elsewhere, where budgets are somewhat lower,
companies tend to rely more heavily on a single
supplier to achieve economies across the range
of activities which they implement. The retail
sector, by contrast, inevitably demands a
greater speed of response and, hence, is more
prone to produce material in-house, where
those with the specialist skills can be located.
Interesting differences in the global accept-
ance and implementation of IMC are seen in
various recent works.
A similar study by Kitchen and Schultz
(1999) showed significant differences between
the five countries surveyed. In response to a
question about the amount of time devoted to
IMC programmes for client firms, for those
indicating more than 50 per cent of their time,
the percentages were 50 per cent for the US, 43
per cent for the UK, 32 per cent for New
Zealand, 5 per cent for Australia and 0 per cent
for India. From the expenditure perspective,
respondents were asked to identify the per-
centage of their overall budgets devoted to IMC
activities, with similar results (US 52 per cent;
UK 42 per cent; New Zealand 40 per cent;
Australia 22 per cent; India 15 per cent).
According to Kitchen and Schultz:whilst IMC is recognized as offering significant
value and importance to clients and agencies