SME practice towards integrated marketing communications

The purpose of this paper is to discover and empirically test the gap between the theory and practice of integrated marketing communications (IMC) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The paper follows a quantitative approach, using the questionnaire technique. Questionnaire items emerged from a literature review and a qualitative step (in-depth interviews). The questionnaire was submitted to a sample of 210 manufacturing firms. Factor and cluster analysis were performed in order to give a descriptive overview of different communication behavioral profiles within SMEs.