Integrated Marketing Communications

The cases of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) primarily present issues related to marketing communication decisions as well as the challenges faced by companies while planning, developing, implementing, and maneuvering marketing communication programs in the context of Bangladesh. The first case is about the pharmaceutical industry of Bangladesh and how the industry is undertaking and integrating its marketing communication activities. The case highlights the industry background including market size and its major players, the typical marketing communication objectives, budgets, and tools of pharmaceutical companies. Further, the case demonstrates the dominant role of personal selling as the driver of pharmaceutical marketing in Bangladesh. A discussion on the use of other promotional tools and the integration perspective of the IMC tools concludes the case. The second case presents the integrated marketing communication strategies of Advanced Chemical Industries Limited (ACI), a leading Bangladeshi FMCG company that also operates internationally. The case demonstrates the contexts and triggers of customer and trade-driven marketing promotion activities. The case highlights the industry background including the product and customer portfolio of ACI, the marketing communication landscape of the FMCG industry in Bangladesh, and the trade-off encountered by ACI to decide between customer and trade-driven marketing promotion. The case also demonstrates a critical appreciation of customer and trade-oriented communication and the regulatory perspective of marketing communication in the FMCG industry of Bangladesh. The third case primarily focuses on the marketing and communication amplifiers employed by the leading print news outlet of Bangladesh—The Daily Prothom Alo. For the nature of the product, the promotion strategies and the marketing communication amplifiers are presumed to be different for a news outlet. This case emphasizes the context, underlying mechanism, and extent of such differences as well as presents the reasoning for the differences. It also highlights the measurement criteria used by Prothom Alo for assessing the effectiveness of marketing communication. How the company adapted to designing and implementing a multidimensional campaign during the post-pandemic period was at the center of the highlights presented in the case.