Korean Public Relations Practitioners’ Perspectives on Integrated Marketing Communications Implementation

Abstract

Since the appearance of integrated marketing communications (IMC) in the
early 1990s, its differing characterizations as a ‘new marketing
communication paradigm’ versus ‘nothing new’ or ‘management fad’ have
not been fully settled. In practice, some organizations operating in
Korea have adopted IMC and many marketing communication service agencies
insist that their specialty lies in IMC. But from an academic
perspective, the field does not seem to be that active here. Why is
this? So far, most of the studies on IMC have utilized a quantitative
research methodology and have focused primarily on enterprises and their
advertising agencies in the areas of perception, implementation,
barriers, evaluation and compensation and other individual elements.
However, IMC depends as much on the cognitive and philosophical
understanding of its practitioners as it does on their strategic or
tactical capabilities. This study utilizing Q methodology sought to
understand how public relations (PR) practitioners in Korea evaluate IMC
in depth based on their experiences. Results show that Korean PR
practitioners believe that IMC maximizes the communications effect and
most advantageously takes into account changing market conditions. This
study also confirmed that there are some barriers to optimum
implementation of IMC in Korea such as low economies of scale, turf
battles and insufficient top management involvement.