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Introduction
The rapid expansion of communication technologies has greatly increased the opportunity for consumers to engage with brands when and where they choose (Rangaswamy and van Bruggen, 2005). One consequence of this increasingly diverse array of personal and electronic touchpoints is the need to seamlessly integrate messaging strategies and tactics across multiple channels and the customer life cycle (Neslin and Shankar 2009). This need has been magnified in recent years because of the increased ability of consumers to select the channels they use (Bell et al., 2014) and the presence of user-generated content, which may contribute to or detract from message consistency (Schultz and Peltier, 2013). Marketers have been slow to re-align their cross-channel communication programs with brand messaging strategies that are consistent across consumer touchpoints (Ots and Nyilasy, 2015).
Although the merits of message unification are apparent, it is a challenge to achieve because of the various ways consumers learn about, interact with and share information about brands (Cummins et al., 2014). As a result, a small but growing stream of research has emerged investigating how diverse communication platforms can be leveraged to drive an “omni-channel” approach to brand engagement, where consumers move freely between personal and online communications as part of a “single” transaction environment. The unification of the brand experience is thus not specific to one or more channels; rather, it is a result of a holistic approach to integrated marketing communications (IMC) (Hansen and Sia, 2015).
Despite the growing literature investigating the interactions among marketing channels, IMC and consumer engagement, there has been little research in an omni-channel domain that pertains to brand and channel choice (Kushwaha and Shankar, 2013; Neslin et al., 2014; Li and Kannan, 2014). Even less is understood about how the IMC process impacts path-to-purchase and conversion-to-sales as part of a single-transaction environment (Brynjolfsson et al., 2013; Li and Kannan, 2014; Verhoef, 2012). Moreover, the extant research is virtually silent on how information consistency (and inconsistency) across customer touchpoints in an omni-channel environment affects customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty (Fulgoni, 2016; Swoboda et al., 2016; Verhoef et al., 2015).
In this paper, we offer an IMC framework for understanding how disparate customer touchpoints impact consumer engagement and profitability in an omni-channel...