Marketing communication: principles and practice

MARKETING COMMUNICATION IN THE VALUE-
CREATING SYSTEM
The corporation can be thought of as a knowledge-conversion system that
creates value for a range of knowledge network members. For some members,
value is created directly through products that can be used to meet needs.
We refer to these members as ‘customers’. Other members acquire benefit
from their membership indirectly. For example, shareholders gain financially
when the system is profitable in producing and supplying value to customers.
Employees similarly receive benefits such as job security, bonuses, and job
satisfaction, when customers’ needs are satisfied.
Wikström and Normann (1994) model the corporation as part of a value
creation network that organizes processes of generation, production, and
representation and creates value by transforming knowledge. This approach
differs from the traditional supply chain management view that is linear,
monological, and fragmented, emphasizing persuasion and ‘informing’.
Instead, a holistic, dialogical, integrated, synchronous, and reciprocal system
of knowledge exploitation is envisaged in which productivity is taken to be
value creation. Within this, corporate conversations take place to generate
knowledge, make offerings, and exchange valued goods and services (tangible
C O M M U N I C A T I O N I D E O L O G Y
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and intangible). There is temporal integration between the three basic
processes (Figures 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7).
Generative processes construct knowledge in activities aimed at solving
problems by attending to both the internal and external domains of the
operating environment (the corporation is not other than the environment,
it is part of it). We saw the need for this when we examined mindfulness and
appreciation in chapter three.
Productive processes then use the knowledge to provide products as part
of the offerings to be made to customers. Goods and services are manifest
knowledge that has use value. All businesses sell knowledge in some form 
or other.
Representative processes relate manifest knowledge to customers in a
manner in which they can incorporate this knowledge into their own value-