Integrated Communication in the Marketing of Lifelong Learning Programmes

1. INTRODUCTIONFacing a continuous increase of complexity of products, services, lifestyles, to market fragmentation, competition growth, to people's feeling that time is more and more precious, if considering the increased segmentation of consumer tastes and preferences and also the progress of customers requirements, who become more and more interested in quality, communications in marketing strategies become of central importance for the achievement of all institutional objectives had in view. This challenging environment involves a more difficult task for marketing specialists, that of fulfilling customer needs and of developing strong positive relationships with the internal and external publics. In this respect, all organizations, regardless of their object of activity, use different marketing communication tools in order to promote their products/services and to achieve their general and specific goals. In accordance to the American Marketing Association, on its official web page (American Marketing Association, 2016), marketing communication is an all-encompassing term, as it covers marketing practices and tactics including advertising, branding, graphic design, promotion, publicity, public relations and so on. Its fundamental purpose is to build up and consolidate the brand, being considered to be the only way to create and sustain its competitive advantages (Mihart 2012,122).2. EVOLUTION OF INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATION (IMC), ACTUAL PERSPECTIVES AND ITS MAIN FEATURESThe concept of integrated communication in marketing, emergent in the late twentieth century, registered a significant evolution, including aspects of understanding and acceptance of its basic principles and gaining its notoriety among theoreticians and practitioners. Kitchen et al. (2008, 531) sustained that "the concept is still in academic and professional development" and this statement can be assumed even now, especially referring to the practical business area. This continuous progress is given by the fact that the concept has all the necessary characteristics to be in the center of the academic research area, but also in the business zone, where the research results are put into practice.As Kitchen and Schultz (1999, 2000) sustain, "IMC is undoubtedly the major communications development of the last decade of the 20th century". In the early 1980s, the concept of integrated marketing communications was an unrecognized paradigm, the theory and practice of advertising, sales promotion, publicity etc., being always approached in a separatist manner or as individual disciplines (Kitchen et al. 2004). Integration of the marketing communications was first seen as a simple coordination of promotional tools. This perspective was later on enlarged, the concept being now viewed as a complex strategic process which contributes in a profound way to the achievement of the objectives of an organization. In this respect, Kitchen et al. (2004) sustain that integrated marketing communication has evolved from a simple inside-out device that brings promotional tools together up to a strategic process associated with brand management. Its complexity is given by the relatively recent approach from literature, according to which integrated marketing communication works specifically through all the four classic elements of the marketing mix: product, price, placement and marketing communications (Mihart 2012, 121). This approach reveals that the integrated position must be adopted not only for the last element (i.e. marketing communications), but also for the entire marketing mix. In this way, the integrated marketing communication appears as a holistic concept that includes the product, price, placement and promotion policies in order to offer an unified image, with complement and uniform messages or, in other words, communicating with the same voice in all circumstances under which the organization meets its targeted audience. On this line, the four important components of the marketing strategy support each other, "providing clarity, consistency and maximum communications impact" (Schultz 1993,17) and, in this way, create better results in a cost-effective manner. …