Integration scenarios in football

Even though Integrated Marketing Communications have attracted considerable attention within the academic community for almost three decades (Kliatchko & Schultz, 2014), their practical application is yet to be studied to the same extent. The few studies that examine IMC’s implementation tend to focus on successful and large organisations, which often represent the ‘best case’ integration scenario, while ignoring less successful and smaller companies where integration might not occur. As a result, an optimistic and rather myopic view of the IMC implementation landscape has been presented, which might not correspond with the state of integration in practice. This study aims at acquiring a more holistic view of IMC’s practical implementation, by studying a full industry sector of client organisations (the football industry), and examining whether and to what extent IMC is implemented. For this reason, a qualitative research design is employed, in order for rich information to be collected, allowing the author to gain an insight to both the practices encountered and the views expressed. In more detail, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the census of the organisations comprising the industry sector selected, the Premier League clubs of five consecutive seasons (2010/11, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2013/14 and 2014/15), 30 in total.