Teaching Integrated Marketing Communication Campaigns

TEACHING INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATION CAMPAIGNSSince at least the 1990s, scholars and practitioners have recommended ways to incorporate the principles of integrated marketing communications (IMC) into the college classroom. The majority of the available scholarly work on education has addressed a range of curricular and theoretical issues. However, while academics and professionals are in agreement that a campaigns course is an essential component of an curriculum, and despite the increasing number of journals and conferences that focus on teaching or its component parts (e.g., Teaching Journalism u0026 Mass Communication, Journal of Public Relations Education, Journal of Advertising Education, Journalism u0026 Mass Communication Educator, the American Management Associationu0027s Educatorsu0027 Conference), surprisingly little scholarship directly addresses the teaching of campaigns or offers advice to educators on how to apply the principles of integration in their campaigns courses.The present study seeks to address these gaps in the education literature and, in doing so, to provide practical guidance that can be used by instructors teaching in small and/ or strategic communication programs. In order to assess our courseu0027s learning objectives, tactics, and student learning outcomes, particularly in regard to campaign integration, we conducted quantitative and qualitative content analyses of 39 campaign plan books developed by teams of students enrolled in different sections of the strategic planning and positioning course and in the campaigns course taught as the capstone to the four-course strategic communication sequence housed in the communication department of a public research university. The analyses focused on (a) the degree and nature of integration evidenced in the studentsu0027 campaign plan books and (b) the content differences in the campaigns produced by students taking the class sections taught by a professor who was a former advertising professional versus those produced by students whose professor was a former public relations and journalism professional. Our findings provide important insights regarding the teaching of courses, including the relationships between course objectives and outcomes, the relationships between instructorsu0027 prior industry backgrounds and their teaching approaches, and the understanding of the theory and practice of communication platform integration in the classroom.LITERATURE REVIEWPractitionersu0027 and Educatorsu0027 Insights on CurriculaThere is considerable debate over how best to bridge the divides between the professional practice of and its teaching. However, most of the scholars who publish in this area, and whose work will be discussed throughout this literature review, appear to agree with at least the logic of IMC, as summarized by Griffin and Pasadeos (1998, p. 4):Conceptually, suggests that advertising and public relations efforts achieve their greatest impact when coupled together and with other marketing elements such as direct marketing and sales promotion to communicate with consumers through multiple channels. In practice, rejects past mass-media strategies by citing the increasingly segmented audiences of today.Building on these principles, in 2005, the Journal of Advertising devoted an entire issue to scholarship focused on improving the learning and teaching of IMC (Patti, 2005, p. 7). As noted by Charles Patti, one of the issueu0027s guest editors, educators in the field share a number of common questions and concerns:As we prepare students to be practitioners and researchers, how well do our curricula reflect what we believe are the most important dimensions of IMC? Is what we teach truly reflective of the state of IMCu0027s ongoing development as a discipline? Are we teaching industry best practices? (2005, p. 7)Patti, his fellow guest editors, and the various contributors to the issue identified a shared need for an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to education (2005, p. …