Online and offline integration in marketing communication. Delving into the business perspective

Literature about Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is still evolving, but lacks a systematic focus on online and offline integration approaches. This research aims to identify the key managerial issues related to online and offline integration within IMC and explore the existence of clusters of firms with consistent conducts and results. We carried out a survey with 124 large firms operating in Italy, running first exploratory factor analyses and then a non-hierarchical cluster analysis. The former highlight the nature of the implementation modalities of online and offline integration in IMC, the main types of advantages, and the different categories of barriers to such implementation. The latter results in two clusters of firms. Academic and managerial implications are presented along with future research directions.