Marketing communication: principles and practice

I N T R O D U C T I O N
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Usunier’s solution is to recognize that global marketing can be more
usefully understood as intercultural marketing. This properly recognizes the
interaction between people, products, and symbols, as buyers and sellers who
have different national cultural backgrounds. 
In another review of marketing thinking, Gummesson (1993) identifies
six further weaknesses in the way marketing is presented in traditional text-
books (summarized in Table 1.3). He simply does not believe that most
textbooks in this field meet the claim that they cover every important
marketing topic in detail. Ironically, some advertising of marketing textbooks
has been misleading and unethical!
Marketing enterprise depends on, and perpetuates, the notion that
consumer choice is rational (O’Shaughnessy, 1987). The intellectual task 
for marketers is to find order and reason in what might appear emotional 
or unreasonable. Consumer behaviour towards brands and as consumers has
been described as schizophrenic. The marketing task is to plot the predict-
ability of the unpredictability, and to provide rules for what may seem
random.
Marketing itself, as we now know it, is a cultural borrowing, with its origins
in the industrialization of the USA (Usunier, 1993). In many countries it is
merely the word marketing that has been imported – the US-originated
concept and social practices have been merely superimposed on to and
merged into local selling practices, rather than replacing them (Allen, 1978).
WEAKNESS IN TRADITIONAL TEXTBOOK
EXPLANATIONS OF MARKETING
COMMUNICATION
In writing this book as a contemporary introduction to marketing communi-
cation, the author has attempted to respond to the past shortcomings by
examining marketing communication as a cultural enterprise and products
as social symbols. This makes the management of marketing communication
an essentially intercultural problem of enabling and facilitating commerce
in a complex intertwining of market-based exchange and social relationships.
Orthodox economists emphasized ‘goods’ with utility value. We consider
products to include goods (manufactures) and services.
Marketing communication is almost always presented in textbooks as
promotion of producer and product to a predetermined audience to elicit a
desired response. If only it were actually that simple! The communication
needs of marketing are much broader – even including the possibility that
consumers may wish to consider the purchase of your product, and thereby
become your customers! Marketing efforts, even when pre-planned, emerge
through the interactions (negotiations or encounters) of interested actors.
Market research is clearly communication between producer and consumer
– but is mostly not promotional – although even distinction is difficult, since
in asking people to consider aspects of your provisional offering (product
characteristics, pricing policy, distribution arrangements, and so on) you
create an impression. All of the design, production, promotion, and delivery