Marketing communication: principles and practice

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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Consumers and buyers may come to hear about your product through
various means, but will also hear about others too. The principle of ‘market
education’ is that people are more likely to respond to your selling message
when they understand what is being sold. Market education, or pre-selling,
can have the following effect on advertising:
• it will help to make it more readily acceptable and to produce more
response
• it can save considerable sums of money since the public relations activity
will cost much less than a commensurate level of advertising
• the advertising run will be more cost-effective
As well a helping the customer to learn, marketing communication systems
can (and should) help the corporation to learn. Thus, market research and
customer complaints are mechanisms by which customers educate the
marketer.
RESPONSE TO MARKETING ACTION
What seems to be forgotten in much discussion of marketing, is that
sometimes it is the consumers and buyers, not the providers, who initiate
marketing actions. Traditional marketing focuses on attention-getting and
persuasion to attract consumers to become customers. Interactive marketing
has a different, more strategic, agenda – to maintain a healthy customer–
supplier relationship with each consumer or buyer.
Expressive communication actions – from the marketer to the consumer
– are intended to affect consumer and buyer behaviour in a way that is
advantageous to the supplier, through promotional messages. Impressive
communication actions can, on the other hand, affect the marketer’s
behaviour as well. These are intended to be advantageous to both. Thus,
elicitation should come as an early input to the value-creation process (at
the generative phase). Table 4.3 attempts to provide the manager’s learning
framework.
Figure 4.11 and Box 4.5 consider some of the classic questions posed by
marketing.