Integrated Marketing Communications is a new text which will answer the key questions of what marketing communications is, how it works and why it is such a vital contemporary marketing function. It is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of this complex and rapidly evolving area.The author's long experience in the industry, and as a senior academic, ensures that the book is able to show how the communications process really works and how it can best be managed in a strategically and tactically cost effective manner. Throughout the book the framework of analysis, planning, implementation and control is used to help the student organize their approach to the complex decision making in the present communications environment.This is both an essential text and an indispensible reference resource and has been rigorously developed for undergraduates and postgraduates in Marketing and Business, and for the new CIM Certificate and Diploma exams in Business Communication, Promotional Practice and Marketing Communications.Considers the important role and contribution of the tools of market research, and explores the key issues of branding, brand imagery, brand extensions and brand stretchCarefully structured to give a complete picture of all components in modern marketing communications and the changing nature of the marketing communications environmentProvides an overview of the important dimensions of consumer and organizational buying behaviour