Marketing communication: principles and practice

I N T R O D U C T I O N
12

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Clearly, it is not intended that you memorize, word-for-word, this verbose
statement. There are plenty of relevant definitions elsewhere. This carefully
crafted description is dissected in chapter two so as to allow a full appreciation
of the significance of a communication process perspective on marketing and
marketing communication. 
THE CONTRIVED EVOLUTION OF HUMAN
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
Although the real task of the student of marketing communication is to look
forward to better possibilities, there is considerable benefit in taking a
historical review to help us to understand the contemporary place of market-
ing in society. We cannot separate developments in marketing from the
environment, which of course provided technologies for communicating.
Each new development enables further possibilities.
Rosengren (1999), for example, shows that in ‘the great wheel of culture
in society’, economy and technology are adjacent basic societal institutions
that share an instrumental value orientation. By ‘instrumental’ we mean
focused on use or purpose.
The expansion of media systems has increasingly enabled merchants to
become marketers in speaking to consumers of the availability and desirability
of their goods and services (Kline, 1993). In the second half of the nineteenth
century, advertising became a valued instrument of merchandising, and
became seen as a valuable diversion of capital from production and product
improvement. Promotion became an investment. Table 1.4 is intended
summarily to suggest that the application of a marketing concept and related
social practices has been an aspect of social conditions. It is not implied 
that technologies were the drivers, though it is true that the availability 
of certain technologies provided marketers with an enhanced capacity to
communicate.
Communication tools have become what their users wanted, only limited
by availability of technology and science. Largely, in Western capitalist
societies, developments in the tools for communicating have been driven 
by marketing ambitions (Fang, 1997). Indeed, many of the social systems
have developed into industries in their own right, e.g. newspapers, radio, TV,
cinema, the Internet. Mass communication made possible mass advertising 
to generate the necessary ‘hungers’ that led to mass consumption. This, in
turn, gave purpose to mass production.