Marketing communication: principles and practice

INTRODUCTION
Consumer behaviour is what people do as consumers as they seek to live their
lives, including exchanging some things for value products or services that
satisfy their needs – this includes processes of browsing (e.g. ‘window-
shopping’, reading magazines, watching television, etc.) and selection,
purchase, use, evaluation and influencing others, and disposal. There are two
sides to the consumer behaviour coin: 
• Consumers decide how to spend their time and money to buy and consume
products and services that satisfy their own recognized needs (response
to hunger, love, vanity, fear, identity, recognition, insecurity, stimulation,
etc.).
• ‘Marketers’
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offer products and services so that consumers will buy from
them, thus satisfying consumer needs for money, which, in turn, satisfies
their own needs.
The field of consumer behaviour study has developed, originally as part of
marketing study and more recently as a distinct discipline, since the 1960s,
with contributions from psychology, economics, sociology, organizational
behaviour, and anthropology. The economists have explained consumer
behaviour as engagement in securing scarce resources in a free market. Thus,
according to this view, marketing is an allocation process. 
Consumer behaviour has both logical/cognitive and emotional/affective
aspects. Psychology helps to explain the processes you enact as an individual
in interacting with your world. Thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are
emphasized. Sociology emphasizes the effects of social arrangements on
consumer behaviour. The act of consumption is rarely a solitary one.
Anthropology, on the other hand, focuses on the effects of culture and values
on direct and symbolic choices (product selection is discussed at length later
in this chapter). We can apply an understanding of corporate structures and
culture in understanding the role of corporate actors in exchanges with
consumers.
As managers, we are concerned with where and when we can cause
representations of ourselves and our products to enter the minds of relevant
buyers and consumers. Consumption is communicative and requires human
interaction for it to make sense – consumption is derived through
communication.
There has been a tendency for writers of marketing textbooks to rely on
the burgeoning field of consumer behaviour, while ignoring another important
perspective on the behaviour of people in society – cultural studies. An
attempt is made here to correct this weakness by locating this discussion of
marketing communication within the field of popular culture. This does not
take for granted that marketing, advertising, public relations, and news