A View of the Communication Process

Integrated marketing communications involves identifying the target audience and shaping a well-coordinated promotional program to elicit the desired audience response. Too often, marketing communications focus on overcoming immediate awareness, image, or preference problems in the target market. But this approach to communication is too shortsighted. Today, marketers are moving toward viewing communications as managing the customer relationship over time. Because customers differ, communications programs need to be developed for specific segments, niches, and even individuals. And, given the new interactive communications technologies, companies must ask not only, "How can we reach our customers?" but also, "How can we find ways to let our customers reach us?"

Thus, the communications process should start with an audit of all the potential contacts target customers may have with the company and its brands. For example, someone purchasing a new computer may talk to others, see television ads, read articles and ads in newspapers and magazines, visit various Web sites, and try out computers in one or more stores. The marketer needs to assess what influence each of these communications experiences will have at different stages of the buying process. This understanding will help marketers allocate their communication dollars more efficiently and effectively.

To communicate effectively, marketers need to understand how communication works. Communication involves the nine elements shown in Figure 15.2. Two of these elements are the major parties in a communication—the sender and the receiver. Another two are the major communication tools—the message and the media. Four more are major communication functions—encoding, decoding, response, and feedback. The last element is noise in the system. Definitions of these elements follow and are applied to an ad for Hewlett-Packard (HP) color copiers.

•	Sender: The party sending the message to another party—here, HP.

•	Encoding: The process of putting thought into symbolic form—HP's advertising agency assembles words and illustrations into an advertisement that will convey the intended message.

•	Message: The set of symbols that the sender transmits—the actual HP copier ad.

•	Media: The communication channels through which the message moves from sender to receiver—in this case, the specific magazines that HP selects.

•	Decoding: The process by which the receiver assigns meaning to the symbols encoded by the sender—a consumer reads the HP copier ad and interprets the words and illustrations it contains.

•	Feedback: The part of the receiver's response communicated back to the sender—HP research shows that consumers are struck by and remember the ad, or consumers write or call HP praising or criticizing the ad or HP's products.

•	Noise: The unplanned static or distortion during the communication process, which results in the receiver’s getting a different message than the one the sender sent—the consumer is distracted while reading the magazine and misses the HP ad or its key points.

For a message to be effective, the sender's encoding process must mesh with the receiver's decoding process. Thus, the best messages consist of words and other symbols that are familiar to the receiver. The more the sender's field of experience overlaps with that of the receiver, the more effective the message is likely to be. Marketing communicators may not always share their consumer's field of experience. For example, an advertising copywriter from one social stratum might create ads for consumers from another stratum—say, blue-collar workers or wealthy business owners. However, to communicate effectively, the marketing communicator must understand the consumer's field of experience.

This model points out several key factors in good communication. Senders need to know what audiences they wish to reach and what responses they want. They must be good at encoding messages that take into account how the target audience decodes them. They must send messages through media that reach target audiences, and they must develop feedback channels so that they can assess the audience's response to the message.