By Daniel Hindin
If there wasn’t already enough motivation for marketers to hop on the IMC bandwagon, the explosion of social media over the last several years has brought IMC to the forefront of the marketing conversation once again.
I was recently interviewed for an article about Vitamin IMC that has since been published on the Medill website. One of the questions was: “How do you see social media fitting in with IMC?” My answer didn’t make it into the article, but I think it’s an important point, so I’ve decided to expand upon it here.
At its most basic level, IMC is about customer-centricity. A common description of IMC is data-driven marketing. While this is true, the term can sometimes come across as impersonal when you start thinking about all the numbers, formulas, data schemes and information that lead us to our marketing strategies.
But all of these techniques are aimed at one thing: a deeper understanding of the consumer. The further an IMCer can escape the generalities of a mass audience and focus on the individual human being making specific choices for themselves and their family, the better he or she can do their job.
Social media has given tremendous power to the individual consumer. The concept of brand has never been whatever the marketer tells the consumer it is. The brand has always been the idea of that brand that the consumer holds in their mind. And that can be different things to different people. Consumers have always had these ideas, but until recently, we as marketers rarely heard from them.
With the advent of social media, consumers can (and do) tell us (and anyone else who will listen) what they think of our brands whenever they feel like it. Some of these thoughts may be positive, and some may be negative.
Whatever the case may be, it’s real live communication. This not only gives us a greater understanding of our brand, but it also gives us an opportunity to respond individually to our consumers’ concerns. If they’re enjoying the brand experience, we can provide them with ways to interact with it on a deeper level. If they’re not enjoying it, we can attempt to understand the disconnect and perhaps bridge the gap.
Either way, a two-way conversation has been established. The pinnacle of a brand experience in the mind of an IMCer is for the consumer to establish a relationship with the brand. Relationships are difficult to form without two-way communication. This is the gift that social media has given to IMC.
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Daniel Hindin is Managing Director of Vitamin IMC and a student in the Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He’s also a social media addict. You can find him tweeting at http://twitter.com/danielhindin.
