Instantiation: Reframing Brand Communication

Abstract

How do brands communicate with consumers? This is a question that runs to the very heart of the marketing process and it has attracted much attention in recent years. In order to understand some of the issues involved we need, however, to identify where our models of brand communication have come from and, in particular, how strongly they are linked to our underlying theories of perception. This should be our starting-point in understanding the process of so-called 'brand communication'. The conceptual landscape in which we believe consumers perceive brands feels so intuitively self-evident that it hardly seems to demand interrogation. We imagine that consumers experience brands in much the same way as they experience everything else in the world around them. They perceive, for example, a physical object such as a table, and light waves from this object are transmitted to, and form perceptions in, their minds. They 'process' these perceptions and then act accordingly by, for instance, walking around the table or placing their coffee on it. There is, in this model, a basic assumption that any act of perception consists of three parts: the object (or event) itself; the waves of light that pass from the object (or event) towards the eye; and the formation of a 'perception' on our retina. When thinking about brand communication, we take this common-sense view of perception and apply it, almost wilfully, to our account of how consumers perceive brands. A brand creates a TV advertising execution, or a piece of packaging, that replaces the table in our basic model. Consumers encounter this marketing activity and it creates perceptions in their minds. These perceptions 'carry', we assume, rational or emotional 'messages', which the consumer then processes at a conscious, or subconscious, level. This framework interprets brand communication as a transmission from a sender (the brand) to a receiver (the consumer) and it is enshrined, in its most exegetical form, in the Shannon Weaver model (Shannon & Weaver 1949). This model of perception seems so very clear to us; the laws of optics, no less, support it. It is, however, a culturally determined way of construing perception and one that has been dominant only in the past 400 years. This is not to say, of course, that it is a model that is factually inaccurate. It is just that it tells only half the story.

Modelling e-mail marketing effectiveness – An approach based on the theory of hierarchy-of-effects

“…Most critiques focus on some assumptions of the AIDA model, such as the idea that all the different stages are sequentially connected (Moriarty 1983). AIDA assumes that the decisions a consumer makes are rational (Moriarty 1983;Barnham 2008) and that the consumer goes through a linear and sequential process composed of discrete interactions, omitting the inter-relation between cognitive and emotional stages (Barry and Howard 1990;Huey 1999).…”

Consumer Reality: How Brands are Constructed

“…Some of this discussion has already been covered in previous papers in this occasional series for the IJMR (Barnham 2008(Barnham , 2009(Barnham , 2010 . In these papers we looked specifically at how essences are constructed in 'propositional hierarchies' .…”

Good Guys : A Cultural Semiotic Study of the Print Advertising of the Oil Industry (1900-2000)

“…Each exposure or experience is integrated with those that are already embedded to create a totality of meaning." Chris Barnham (2008) has also discussed the way in which brands "communicate" through a narrative model based on semiotics. 41 The tremendous goodwill that these generated quickly led to maps becoming a staple product of the different service stations.…”