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Marketing Communications
Consumer Behaviour And Marketing Communication
Promotional contacts between manufacturer and consumer can be termed controllable communication
because the company decides on the advertising and other promotional campaign and determines the
training of its salesmen.
A lot of uncontrollable communication is also going on in the diffusion process. Information exchange
about the company’s product that is beyond the firm’s control can emanate from various advertising or
promotion and sales personnel of competitors and middlemen, independent professional evaluation
through laboratory tests, and the exchange of personal opinions among consumers. These sources of
information about a product cannot be directly controlled by the manufacturer.
When mass media are used to transmit messages about a product, there is no direct contact between
the creator of the message and the recipient. This is the reason why feedback is needed in the form of
advertising research to measure the impact of the appeals used on consumer decision-making.
The influence resulting from personal conversations is very powerful. This is known as word-of-mouth
advertising. Such personal influence comes through interpersonal communication involving direct
face-to-face exchange between communicator, who is usually a delighted or satisfied consumer, and the
receiver or potential consumer, which results in changed behaviour or attitudes on the part of the receiver.
This change in predisposition and behaviour takes place because the human mind has the unique ability
to learn by and from communication. A person does not need own experience with an innovation –
the person can learn a behaviour change according to other people’s experiences or opinions, this is
one reason why the understanding of the diffusion process is important in marketing communication.
Consumers are not isolated individuals; they are members of social systems.
A social system is defined as a population of individuals who are different but interrelated, and are
engaged in collective problem-solving behaviour.
A social system consists, in totality, of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which
has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the
optimization of gratification and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and
mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured, shared symbols and language.
A social system is a group of persons who interact more or less frequently because they have something
in common such as problems, activities, interests, place of birth and/or living, languages and so on.
From the diffusion process point of view, the members of a social system have at least one characteristic in
common which makes them potential buyers or influencers for a company’s product, such characteristics
may be – same sex or interests, similar age or profession and so on.