Chapter 8 Communication and Consumer Behaviour

COMMUNICATION AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Communication (from Latin „communis‟, meaning to share) is the activity of conveying

information through the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech,visual, signals, writing or behaviour. (Wikipedia, 2012). Communication is the unique toolthat marketers use to persuade consumers to act in a desired way to vote, to make a purchase,to make a donation, to patronize a retail store. Communication takes many forms; it can beeither verbal or visual, and a combination of two. There are many ways to definecommunication; most writers would agree that communication is the transmission of amessage from a sender to a receiver via a medium of some sort. Many people believe thatcommunication is a feedback which alerts the sender intended message. There are five basiccomponents of communication process from the perspective of marketing and consumer behaviour.

 (the source) The sponsor, or initiator, of the message first must decidewhat the message should convey to whom to be sent and then must encode the message insuch a way that its meaning is interpreted by the targeted audience in precisely the intendedway. The sender has a large arsenal from which to draw encoding their message they can usewords, picture, symbols, spokesperson, and special channel. They can buy space or time inselected media to advertise or broadcast their message or they can try to have their message publish