Marketing communication: principles and practice

THE APPRECIATIVE SYSTEM
How can we understand the healthy communication system from a social
perspective? One way is to understand communication as ‘appreciation’.
Every act of a person is interpreted by other people and so becomes
communication only when meaning is attributed to it by the other(s), i.e.
when it is perceived and appreciated. Sir Geoffrey Vickers (1984) could find
no accepted word to describe the attaching of meaning to perceived signals
to create communication. He thus referred to this mental activity as
‘appreciation’, the code it uses as its ‘appreciative system’, and the state of
the code as the ‘appreciative setting’. Note the similarity of this model to that
of McGuire’s information-processing sequence, but also that Vickers did not
limit his explanation to ‘information’, rather than choosing the larger and
distinctly different concept of ‘communication’. We will discuss this further
as a valuable insight can be brought into thinking about managing.
Vickers has clarified the nature of the problem. Culture and communi-
cation cannot be separated. For us to communicate and cooperate, we must
share some common assumptions about the world we live in, and some
common standards by which to judge our own and other people’s actions.
These shared epistemological assumptions must correspond sufficiently with
reality to make common action effective. The shared ethical assumptions
must meet the minimal mutual needs that the members of our society have
of each other. ‘Culture’ is the shared basis of appreciation and action which
communication develops within any political system (a corporation is a
subsystem of wider society).
Acceptance arises from the apprehender’s choices, not the initiator’s
intentions. Participants to a communicative event take part in a process of
creating shared meaning. First we interpret the situation, then act, influencing
one another.
We all have concerns, in response to each of which we construct an inner
representation of the situation that is relevant to that concern. The
appreciative system (Vickers, 1984) is a pattern of concerns and their
simulated relevant situations, constantly revised and confirmed by the need
for it to correspond with reality sufficiently to guide action, to be sufficiently
shared among people to mediate communication, and to be sufficiently
acceptable for a ‘good’ life. The appreciative system is thus a mental