Marketing communication: principles and practice

The orthodox ‘marketing’ perspective
: Communication is ‘a trans-
actional process between two or more parties whereby meaning is
exchanged through the intentional use of symbols’ (Engel 
et al
., 1994,
quoted in Blythe, 2000: 1).
2.
The communication theorist perspective
: Communication is
‘interaction (i.e. mutual influence), which is intersubjective (i.e. mutually
conscious), intentional and purposive, and is carried out by means of a
system of signs, mostly building on a system of verbal symbols,
characterized by double articulation, and in turn building on fully
developed systems of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics’
(Rosengren, 1999: 38). Rosengren summarizes this as ‘intersubjective,
purposive interaction by means of doubly articulated human language
based on symbols’.
An alternative conception of communication and a further elaboration of
the need for this can be found in chapter two.
In this book, communicating is taken to be the mode for marketing. We
need a definition that acknowledges the central notion that marketing is
communication for particular reasons, rather than allows the misleading view
that communication is simply the promotion part of the whole. 
Grönroos (2000) very helpfully uses the term 
market communication
. This
is, in a sense, a clearer concept than marketing communication. It implies
that buyers and sellers form a market together and that they have to
communicate in order to buy and sell, respectively. Thus, the management
responsibility is to provide and operate effective and efficient systems to enable
the making and keeping of promises – this of course is essentially relational.
As Professor Grönroos points out: ‘everything communicates something
about a firm and its good and services – regardless of whether the marketer
accepts this and acts upon it or not’ (Grönroos, 2000: 264). Let us add that
both buyer and seller may initiate marketing activity, and communication
may be unplanned.
This perspective is complex, but necessarily comprehensive. Marketing is
a social process consisting of individual and collective communicative
activities performed by people as producers, intermediaries, and/or purchasers
that facilitate and expedite participation in voluntary chosen satisfying
tangible and intangible exchanges in social relationships by creating, main-
taining or altering attitudes and/or behaviours in a dynamic environment
through the joint and interactive creation, distribution, promotion, and
pricing of valued goods and services, and the promotion of ideas, causes,
places, and people.