of Journalism, Northwestern University in conjunction with the AAAA, began the first empirical research study designed to investigate how IMC was being used. The study focused around understanding the concept and the importance of IMC and also to analyze the extent in which IMC was practiced in all major U.S advertising agencies. This initial study was then replicated by other studies with a view to examining how IMC was being used in other countries; New Zealand, UK, US, Australia, India, Thailand, South Africa and the Philippines, etc. The findings from these studies demonstrated that the new IMC was far from a "short-lived managerial fad" but rather was "a very clear reaction by advertising agencies and their clients as they are affected by a multitude of factors such as new forms of information technology including development and usage of databases, media fragmentation, client desires for interaction/synergy, and global and regional coordination." This was the second stage of IMC's development, where the focus shifted to documenting the practice of IMC as a global phenomenon. In other words, researchers were attempting to codify practices that had been used for some time. In 1993, Don Schultz and his team published the first text-book dedicated to IMC. Their work, simply entitled, Integrated Marketing Communications, described IMC as a totally new way of looking at the whole of marketing communications, rather than looking at each of the parts separately. And, in the same year, the Medill School at Northwestern University changed their curriculum to include a focus on this new idea of integrated marketing communications rather than the traditional program which had emphasized advertising. IMC emerged from an "academic department that, for several decades, had been recognized as the number one advertising program. Since the mid-1990s, virtually every text-book on the subject of marketing communications has adopted an integrated perspective or has added chapters on IMC in new editions of standard works. Collectively these books focus on the IMC planning processes and this represents the third distinct stage in the evolution of IMC – an emphasis on managing and organizing IMC. Over time, scholars have advanced different definitions of IMC, with each definition exhibiting a slightly different emphasis. Yet, in spite of the variety of definitions in circulation, there is general consensus that integrated marketing communications should be viewed as a planning process. Some scholars have pointed out that because IMC is both a process and