Integrated marketing communication in hospitality SMEs: analyzing the antecedent role of innovation orientation and the effect on market performance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Integrated marketing communication (IMC) process is considered a way to develop a long-term relationship with the organization’s stakeholders and increase its results, besides that, there is still not a clear understanding of factors that have a positive influence on it. As a strategic process that involves the whole organization we believe that strategic orientations can either act as drivers or impediments of this process, specifically, we test the influence of Innovation Orientation (OI) in that process and find out that it be a driver of such process, we also confirm the positive influence of the IMC process in the marketing performance. To do so, we conducted a survey with 250 SMEs of the hospitality sector. Our study contributes both to the IMC and OI literature once that it provides evidence that IMC can be an important tool to help managers to increase marketing performance and that OI can influence process beyond those directly related to innovations, by doing so we broaden the scope of IO and increase the importance of IMC showing that managers can influence their company’s culture towards innovativeness to improve their communication process and in this way achieve greater marketing results.