Revisiting integrated marketing communication (IMC): a scale to assess IMC in higher education (HE)

ABSTRACT

Integrated marketing communication (IMC) has attracted the interest of marketing and management scholars since it was first introduced. A theoretical debate on definitional and measurement issues has also been growing. Thanks to the benefits that IMC can offer organizations, it is interesting to study it with regards to the higher education (HE) environment since higher education institutions (HEIs) have been focusing on the potential of different and new ways of communication and their integration. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore the concept of IMC in HE. And second, to present a tool that measures the level of integration of marketing and communication achieved in the HE context in a non-English speaking country, while also considering different perceptions in the same organization. The methodology of this paper is based on a multi-stage research design adopting qualitative and quantitative approaches. The main contributions are a reliable and valid adaptation of a tool that measures the level of IMC in a set of selected HEIs and a proposal of five dimensions that explain IMC in HE context. This will help to build a more robust theoretical body of knowledge regarding not only IMC but also higher education marketing (HEM).

KEYWORDS:

• Integrated marketing communication (IMC)
• higher education institution (HEI)
• higher education marketing (HEM)
• scale development
• multi-stage design

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the experts who contributed to the first stages of the investigation and the staff (practitioners and academics) of the Spanish Jesuit Universities that participated in the pilot and principal studies. We also thank the editor Rami M. Ayoubi for consideration of this manuscript and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and recommendations to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).