So, the first thing is let’s look at the forms of communication and I’m sure most of you will be familiar with the first principle of the one way model of communication. This is optionally based upon the idea that we have a source for a particular message who encodes a message in a particular format that is they think is relevant to the receiver. They then send that message through a signal in various forms and the receiver then decodes that signal.
The effectiveness to this particular model is dependent upon a number of variables. One of which is that the source understands the receiver and that the receiver has sufficient information to be able to decode the message. So, therefore signs and symbols and words are all going to be very important for us in order to understand the communication that’s in flow. And of course, the flow is one way and so one way form of communication.
The communication is haunt by what are known as realms of understanding. The more the source, for example, Proctor and Gamble understand about a particular target market, the more likely the communication is going to be successful. And of course, if the receiver has sufficient understanding of the range of products and purposes that they’re interested in the more likely they are going to be—understand or attribute meaning to the communications they receive.
All these communications are subject to noise, that’s my little signal for noise, all right, intervention. These scribbles represent noise in the system. Noise can prevent us decoding, understanding and attributing the right meaning to a message. So if a noise can be somebody phoning as the message is being transmitted and understood, it could be background noise literally noise in terms of decibels or it could be confusing signals associated with double meaning associated with particular words. There is some feedback. No, we’re not necessarily but there are opportunities for some feedback to these particular forms of communication. And the most obvious form of communication is broadcast TV ads. Yes, it’s one way of sitting there hopefully receiving the message and we have very little opportunity to feedback on that message.
Now, that’s the one way model. I’m now going to introduce the influence of model where we again we have a message source that sends communications to target audience one, target audience TN. Now, the message goes in the one way model from the source to target audience one but unfortunately, some of the audiences don’t receive that message that the message is interrupted, it’s blocked. They don’t receive it from the source. What they do is perhaps receive messages from influences and there are two types of influences, opinion leaders and opinion formers. Opinion leaders are unofficial experts, people who have knowledge, informal knowledge and qualifications that you like about a particular topic that they’re interested in. They are more than willing to share that knowledge with members of their peer group. And here of course, we have word of mouth in action.
Opinion formers on the other hand are people who have formal qualifications, formal expertise in their particular topic and they are often paid to communicate with target audiences about their topic. So, journalists are opinion formers. Jeremy Clarkson is an opinion former. These people can be identified because of the formality of their communications. Now what organizations do of course, is they stream informations to identified opinion leaders and encourage them and enable them to communicate with their peer group. A bit like twitter is a form of this that’s emerging now. But of course, opinion leadership has been around for a very, very long time. It’s just we have digital options today.
The next model is the response model of communication and what we’ve got here is the one way model that now we’re getting or enabling the recipients to respond to the communication that they have received. So, what we have is the receivers become the source of the next leg of the communication process. So now, we can identify that receivers and sources are people like you and me and millions and millions of other people have the opportunity to join in the communication process. It’s a response model. Partly because of the digitization, interactivity has now become much more common place and a much more potent form of communication. Interactivity can be mediated through technology which is what we refer to but we mustn’t forget that there is interaction through human forms as well.
Personal selling for example has very close form of interaction which very often we forget about when we’re looking at interaction. But interactivity itself is the better off through which relationships can be developed with either consumers or businesses. It’s a critical activity. And interactivity started to be researched in much more detail and I have chosen the work of Johnson and Et al here who list the four dimensions of interactivity. We’ve got reciprocity, responsiveness, the speed of the response and the exchange of non-verbal information in an interaction. Now I’m not going to go into the detail associated dimensions interactivity because that is really beyond what we need to do today. But I just do want to raise to the surface ideas about interaction. It’s just not a linear perspective of interactivity. It’s much more complex and the more we understand about these dimensions, the more likely we’re going to be successful with our communication activity.
Interaction is concerned with response, yes. But a response may not be coherent, it might not be accurate or helpful or even topical, yes because other people shouting each other on the railway station neither them knowing exactly what the other one is trying to convey to the other but it is a response. What we need to move on from response is to an interaction where there is some understanding of what the other person is talking about.
Dialogue emerges from interaction and occurs through mutual understanding and Valentine refers to this as a reasoning approach, a shared approach to interaction, learning together as he appraises it.
And the point I want to make is that interaction and dialogue can be developed through marketing communications and they are the lynchpin of the form and type of relationships that emerged. So, bringing all these things together, we could see that there are a range of communication forms or forms of communications. Well, may communication influence your communication, response base, interaction and then finally dialogue. So, one end of the spectrum we have essentially one way communication and at the other we have dialogue, yeah.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services