I'm a doctoral student in marketing from Sweden involved with teaching marketing communication to bachelor level students. I've been looking for a book on IMC aimed at students on an intermediate level. I must confess that my search so far have been marked by increasing frustration. On the one hand there are excellent "street wise" books written by practitioners for practitioners and on the other you have in-depth scholarly treatments of communication and its influence on culture and society that are steeped in theory and generously sprinkled with references. The problem is to find literature that actually use theory to guide students into practice.
Sadly this book is no exception. The earlier reviews suggest that this book would actually serve as the missing link and the title, referring to things like innovation and creativity, adds to the expectation. But it's neither the personal experiences of a working professional nor an academic study with its carefully constructed arguments from theory and data. This book is nothing but a collection of checklists, bullet points and an occasional flow chart. There are no case studies, no theories, no references whatsoever. The author seems to have spent an evening cutting and pasting from Kotler, organising the result into a flowchart (Doc Ogden's flow chart, mind you...) and then smacking the overall label of Integrated Marketing Communication on it all. There's no sign of any integration anywhere in the book and elements out of any entry level textbook are simply stacked one on top of another.
The final chapter claims to "bring it all together" but it's just six puny pages on evaluation. And speaking of pages, every chapter ends with a number of empty pages with one or two headlines where the reader has graciously been provided with space to express his or hers own thoughts on the subject. In all there are over EIGHTY empty pages out of a total of 185 (I stopped counting). Adding to the hilariousness is the chapter on "cyber marketing" where the Internet shares the meagre page space with tactics on creating a cd-rom, e-mail marketing, EDI and subscribing to database services. Online communities, banner advertising, online auctions and search engines did exist in 1998..!
To sum it up, I guess I'll have to keep looking. It's an utterly miserable book that borders on the comical.