Marketing communication: principles and practice

I N T R O D U C T I O N
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In a capitalist market-based society, relationships are
coercive and turn people into things
INTRODUCTION
It is the provider’s task to establish a meaningful relationship with selected
consumers and buyers as a basis for influence and exchange. Today products
are similar (often identical) in design, price, and performance – i.e. in terms
chapter 
two
A COMMUNICATION
CONCEPT FOR
COMMUNICATING
LEARNING POINTS
Careful study of this chapter will help you to:
• reflect on the conception of communication that pervades our daily
discourses outside of our awareness
• recover marketing as a social process in which people come first, products
follow
• imagine marketing communication as managed conversations and to
compare and contrast this with the notion of designed messages
• examine our ideas about communicators and their interchanges in markets

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of core benefits to users and consumers – so must be differentiated through
benefit augmentation to attract buyer and consumer attention when
promoted. Thus, nowadays marketing communication is much more than
notifications of availability. Daily experience and our knowledge of marketing
principles show that communication in marketing is much more than
informing, since we can observe such actions as sponsorship, product
repositioning, consumer targeting, image redefinition, brand renewal, and
so on.
Marketing communication is a set of purposive activities, linked and
coordinated to some degree. These activities are simply some of the actions
that occur in a situation, impart some influence on the situation and are in
turn influenced by the context in which they arise. Contexts are not isolated
sets of circumstances that are easily identified – rarely do we have full
knowledge. A particular situation is the intersection of people, technologies,
and processes.
The traditional models of communication – both linear and ‘two-way’
versions – emphasize individual behaviour and fail to account for the social
nature of the human communication process. They treat identity, meaning,
and knowledge as if they arise in the mind of the individual in isolation of
their environment. But, it is clear that in communicating we are mutually