Marketing communication: principles and practice

Selling though direct targeting
limited (by the corporation) to sending out 
information to customers. Customers are able 
to play a part as they seek information and 
express their needs and interests. The site 
provides segmented information and gathers 
queries, requests, and suggestions – 
information is exchanged with stakeholders. 
The marketing manager has to provide a site 
that attracts people who have different 
interests.
Total commitment
The website is built to enable a high degree 
of interaction between buyer and seller, as 
One-to-one interaction in a 
part of the integration of e-commerce into the 
networked e-commerce community
overall business strategies and processes of 
the corporation and its business partners (the 
value chain). This will almost certainly mean 
rethinking the design of the business through 
the adoption of a new model of business.

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of competition will assume less prominence. Communication as dialogue,
rather than simply informing, will continue to grow in importance. 
THE CORPORATE COMMUNICATION SYSTEM 
OF MANAGING
Today we see increasing evidence for the convergence of the traditionally
discrete marketing and public relations functions into a more strategic
integrated management function known as corporate communication. This
handles the totality of the corporation’s links into the operating environment
and well as the response to it. Debate continues about that part of the overall
management task having to do with the management of important relation-
ships, and with communicating with groups in these relationships. This ‘sub-
task’ may be argued over by marketing, customer relations, and human
resource management, or public relations specialists. Its importance has been
emphasized in recent years by the Royal Society of the Arts’ study on the
sustainable success of the company of the future (RSA, 1995).
The corporate enterprise has two primary communication systems that are
interrelated. The internal system directs activities of organizing to accomplish
goals that are based on the gathering and interpretation of data on expecta-
tions and attitudes, and on conditions, from the corporation’s relevant
environment through external channels of communication. External systems
of communication are also used to present relevant information about the
internal processes of the corporation to the relevant external environment
to attempt to influence the behaviour of the various publics. Internal
communication processes are directed towards establishment of structure
and stability in organizing, while external communication processes are
directed towards innovation by facilitating identification of directions for
corporate development (Kreps, 1990). Managers and leaders seek coopera-
tion for a productive balance between stability and innovation.
Rather than seeing traditional departments and narrow specialist groups
operating in institutional silos in competition – for supremacy (see Lauzen,
1991), to protect their turf; to secure credibility, for a seat at the boardroom
table, to secure the ear of the dominant coalition, or simply for resources –
a model of integrated communication systems seeks to build bridges between
the islands of communication (see Gayeski, 1993), and to establish eventually
new task groupings, perhaps by way of cross-functional working in the
interim. As organizations re-engineer working arrangements and formal
structure around business processes, so they should re-engineer their com-
munications management into a truly corporate (sub)system for managing. 
Departments should not be allowed to seek independence and the concern
of managers should not be encroachment, but how to remove barriers to
real cooperative working so that communicating really can add value to
business enterprise. The model we seek to build and deploy does not promote
the engagement of non-specialists in competition with managing traditional
communication departments. Rather we seek to foster greater recognition
of corporate dependencies, the need for wider participation in constructing