Marketing communication: principles and practice

Figure 2.2
The ladder of inference
Source
: Based on Argyris, 1990
Personal beliefs
Personal conclusions
Personal assumptions
Particular interpretation into
a meaning
Selective apprehension
of sense data
situation
Action
Action
Figure 2.3
Intersubjective divergence

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Morality of communication practices
The moral question is whether all positions are granted an equal right of co-
determination. Morally, psychology pursues reflective autonomy (of the
person), sociology pursues legitimate social order (of the collective), and
communication pursues equable participation (in the social system). We
need a communication theory of managing (this is largely a personal value
decision) about why rather than how. 
We no longer have cosmos (an ordered, predictable system), instead the
(post)modern world is chaos (formless, utter confusion). There is no longer
fundamental consensus on what things mean – interaction has become about
values and differing meanings. We no longer have a stable, homogeneous
society. The problem of ‘inadequate communication’ is not merely one 
of divergent understandings but of divergent interests. We need real
communication, not ‘more’ or ‘better’ communication. Interaction can no
longer be the expression and transmission of meaning (an information
process). It has become about the construction and negotiation of meaning
(a communication process). 
Marketing is theorized as participative, i.e. voluntary exchange (a nego-
tiative constitution), but is most practised as strategic or consensual (a
dominant constitution supported by systematic distortions). For example,
advertising is almost always dominant expression and is selected as the means
of communication because it is so. Yet goals cannot be preconceived but
are co-determinate.
Figure 2.4 summarizes the alternative conceptions of human communi-
cation. Since this book is taking an intercultural approach to defining
marketing communication, it is the cultural model that will be assumed to
underlie most of the remainder of the discussion in the following chapters.
As we shall see in chapter four, it is the motives and intentions of
communicating marketers that are often inconsistent with the concept 
of marketing (see also Box 2.2).