IMC in digitally-empowering contexts: the emerging role of negotiated brands

In current digitally-empowering contexts, the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) paradigm may have lost its ‘original’ customer-centric focus. Drawing on service-dominant logic, the paper examines the changes to IMC when multiple sources of consumer power emerge as central in the value creation process. This change in the focus of IMC likely enables the emergence of negotiated brands, i.e. brands that focus on a marketplace where traditional marketer-created brand value may be replaced by buyer and seller co-created value. The paper argues that this novel type of brand structure represents an appropriate managerial response to multidimensional IMC approaches. As that occurs, four key issues (community-centric orientation, emergent strategy, hybrid communication mix, reciprocity-based assessment) emerge which lead to a number of research questions in the planning and execution of marketing communications in today’s digitally-empowered contexts. All these issues clearly highlight the consumers’ contributions to brand value co-creation, by reaffirming the ‘original’ outside-in perspective of IMC.