Connectivity: A Prism for the Identification of IMC Constructs in the Ethiopian Beer Market

Abstract

This study revisits the constructs of integrated marketing communication (IMC) by assessing the customers of Habesha Breweries in Ethiopia. A customer-driven view of IMC is developed around the concepts of customer-dominant logic, value-in-use and communication-in-use. The findings support customer-integrated marketing communications that emphasise customers’ purchasing decisions that arise from internal and external brand communication contacts. This study revisits the Duncan and Moriarty (1997) and Grönroos (2015) categorisations of IMC as sources of brand contacts by introducing and developing constructs such as physiological needs, product technical quality and complementary goods. The originality of this study also lies in the conceptualisation of physiological needs and their relationship to the construct of connectivity. The suggestion is that the starting point for marketers’ implementation of IMC should be a thorough understanding of the customer’s context, and more specifically, that the diverse constructs of IMC align with either the communal or the individual dimensions of connectivity. These findings should drive interest in future large-scale quantitative tests.

Keywords

• connectivity
• physiological needs
• product technical quality
• complementary goods
• brand contact