Marketing communication: principles and practice

INTRODUCTION
Although we don’t notice everything around us, we live in a world that is in
a continuous state of becoming. There is no such thing as stability, and
there never has been. Today, change is more noticeable because the rate of
change is accelerating. The timescale between noticeable changes is within
our personal experience.
In only a few years, and certainly within the professional working lives of
marketers, a number of key trends, centred on globalization, have emerged
(Evans 
et al
., 1996):
• Society is continuing to polarize around economic and political interests,
creating a two-speed economic and communication system (Mattelart,
1995).
• Mass markets are fragmenting.
• The market is increasingly a regulating factor of society.
• Retailers, because they meet consumers directly, have taken charge of
market development, displacing producers to a subcontracting role.
• Markets have more production than consumption and have reached or
are nearing saturation.
• A few multinational corporations control most production and distribution
(by 1990–91, according to Lang and Hines (1993), the top 500
corporations controlled over half of world trade but employed only 0.05
per cent of the population. In 1991, the ten largest corporations had a
collective revenue greater than the combined wealth of the 100 smallest
countries (Hawken, 1993).
• New technologies in all spheres of human activity.
• The nature and status of ‘communication’ has changed: it became
professionalized and its responsibilities profilerated (Mattelart, 1995). 
• Commercial cosmopolitanism.
CHANGING CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AND
MARKETING SITUATION
As you might expect, we should identify changes in consumer attitude 
and behaviour, the marketplace, and providers. The number of people who
defer to the offerings of providers is declining – more of us are active
consumers who know what we want and what we will pay for it. We can
expect further shift towards buyer-initiated relationships (the tradition has
been to think of marketing as initiated by the seller). This phenomenon 
has been termed reverse marketing (Ottesen, 1995; Leenders and Blenkhorn,
1988) to recognize that once a relationship has been established, either