Mapping the Integrated Marketing Communications Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Given the growing popularity of integrated marketing communications (IMC) among academicians and businessmen, this study examines the trends of theoretical development in IMC during 1991-2020 by using a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 303 academic research papers. In addition to examining the citation and publication structures in terms of authors, institutions, countries, and sources, this study explores the publications and citations trends and identifies conceptual and intellectual structure of IMC literature. The results demonstrate that IMC literature follows a steady but slow growth rate, although average citations per document are high. Kitchen, PJ. (author), Northwestern University (institution), USA (country), and Journal of Marketing Communications (source) contributed the most to IMC literature. With 216 multi-authored documents, IMC can be recognized as a field of high research collaboration. About 84% of the keywords appeared only once in IMC literature. In addition, the foundation of IMC rests on a small number of articles by a few researchers published in handful number of journals. Finally, the keyword co-occurrence network analysis identifies different clusters of IMC research, of which clusters marked with the keywords (1) brand equity, (2) measurement, (3) IMC and consumer empowerment represent the highest research potential.