In the mid-1970s, Schultz began teaching advertising at the Michigan State University and in 1977, he joined the faculty at Northwestern University, where he became department chair and associate dean. In 1991, Schultz was part of a team at the
Medill School of Journalism,
Northwestern University which in conjunction with the
American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), began the first empirical study designed to investigate how
integrated marketing communications was being used by practitioners. 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. When this initial study was replicated by other studies in a number of countries; New Zealand, UK, US, Australia, India, Thailand, South Africa and the Philippines, etc., they 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." Collectively these studies suggested that marketing communications was undergoing a transitional phase. In 1993, 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. Also in 1993, Schultz and 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. Often referred to as the "father of integrated marketing", Schultz was the author or co-author of 28 books and 150 trade/academic articles on
marketing. His books include:
Integrated Marketing Communications (1993);
Communicating Globally (2000) and
IMC: The Next Generation (2003). He wrote a regular column on Integrated Marketing for
Marketing Management magazine, the trade publication of the
American Marketing Association. ==Awards and recognition==