Marketing communication: principles and practice

A C O M M U N I C A T I O N C O N C E P T
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to talk with others! We can reach consensus if we interact. We need a
conversational model
of corporate life that we can apply in pursuit of
dialogue before expression – Stephen Covey (1989) teaches us why we should
‘seek to understand before seeking to be understood’. Such organized gossip
can lead to serendipity; the repair of faulty mental maps; and productive
‘interchanges’.
The conversing corporation is full of natural talk, curiosity, discussion, and
questions. Conversing corporations can expect:
• more satisfactory goal accomplishment
• recognition of an important value in a pluralistic society in which a wider
range of social values and lifestyle options are emerging
• equality in pay-in (contribution) and pay-out (benefit)
• fair representation of interests
• products and services that fulfil customers’ needs and desires, and meet
workers’ needs for fulfilment and pride
• a self-correcting whole, promising genuine opportunity and progress
• people to have a voice
These benefits are realized when managers take responsibility and account-
ability for constructing and driving systems for communication that enable
and facilitate questioning, paraphrasing, story-telling, and so on. These
systems are capable of overcoming the natural outcome of efforts to
communicate – misunderstanding – that is inherent in the nature of language
use (see Heyman, 1994). Counter-productive behaviour is exposed in such
systems. 
An interaction can be thought of as a behaviour that produces a response.
Communication is thus a special kind of interaction that produces meanings.
We often speak of interactive communication; actually, ‘communicative
interaction’ is what is needed in the workplace. 
Much ‘communication’ and ‘interaction’ practice is ping-pong in nature,
with individuals talking past each other in a dyadic pair of monologues rather
than with each other. Two temporally and spatially co-located, but inde-
pendent, communication systems are operating in this situation. ‘Feedback’
is purported to complete the cycle, but often is little more than reaction (in
the terms of the speaker). Heyman (1994) clarifies the manner in which each
person contributes talk, but there is only limited communication (Figure 2.1). 
Note, however, that talking past each other in a monological dyad is not
the same as dialogue. Communicating is better seen as interaction that co-
constructs meaning by making context differences explicit, leading through
common interpretation to a shared understanding. Why does this not
naturally occur?
According to Heyman, ethnomethodology (a sociological movement
founded by Harold Garfinkel) shows that language use (talk) inherently
creates misunderstanding, because language is necessarily