Marketing communication: principles and practice

COMMUNICATING IN MARKETING CHANNELS
Communication in marketing channels can enable people to persuade,
inform, foster participative decision-making, coordinate programmes,
exercise power, and encourage commitment and loyalty. When things go
wrong and there is no appropriate communication strategy, manufacturers
and resellers can suffer exclusion from decision-making that affects them,
misunderstandings, inappropriate actions, and dysfunctional feelings of
frustration.
Communication moderates distribution channel conditions (which may
be structural and behavioural, such as the pattern of exchange relationships,
power, climate, etc., for example in contracted trading) and channel
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Table 7.6
Some examples of the range of marketing communication
styles
Personal
Impersonal
Informal
Consumer-dominated: 
Internet ‘chat room’
face-to-face conversation
Formal
Market research focus group
Marketer-dominated: 
advertising
Figure 7.5
Contributions of main means of marketing communication
Advertising
Immediate effect on awareness, with delayed effect on sales
due to learning curve of customers
Publicity
Continuous background effect of making other
communication efforts credible
Personal selling
Immediate effect on sales
Sales promotion
Immediate effect in stimulating impulse purchases

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management outcomes (such as member coordination, satisfaction, level of
commitment, performance, and so on, as represented by Figure 7.6 and Table
7.8). 
Research has shown that channel outcomes are enhanced when:
1. a collaborative communication strategy is pursued in relational, supportive,
symmetrical channel conditions
2. an autonomous communication strategy is pursued in transactional,
unsupportive, asymmetrical channel conditions