Industrial Marketing Communication
According to vanRiel(1995), there are three main types of corporate communication:
1. Management communication: Communication is necessary in an organization not only to transmit
authority but also to achieve cooperation (Timm, 1986). The responsibility for this communication 38
exists across all levels of an organization. Senior, middle, and junior management all use communication
to achieve the desired results of the company. Such results include:
• developing a shared vision of the firm within the organization
• establishing and maintaining trust in the leadership of the organization
• initiating and managing the change process
• empowering and motivating employees (Pincus, Robert, Rayfield & DenB onis, 1991).
2. Organizational communication: Used as a general term to include such communication efforts as
public relations, public affairs, investor relations, labor market communication, corporate advertising,
environmental communication and internal communication. All of these forms of communication share
one main element in common: They are directed mainly toward "target groups", i.e. groups with which
the company has an interdependent relationship with, albeit usually indirect. Unlike marketing
communication, organizational communication is often less obvious in it attempts to influence the
behavior of groups on which the organization depends and must cooperate with.
3. Marketing communication: Some scholars draw a line between what has become known as the
promotional mix versus the public relations mix (Verhage & Cunningham, 1989). Others write of the
corporate communication mix and the marketing communication mix (Floor & van Raaij, 1993;
Gusseldo, 1985). In general, marketing communication consists mainly of those forms of communication
that support the sale of goods or services. Four main areas of marketing communication in many mixes
include advertising, sales promotion, public relations/publicity and personal selling (Kotler, Armstrong,
Saunders, & Wong, 1996). It has already been established that this study will focus on the marketing
communication tools used by industrial sellers to provide information, as well as those tools used by
industrial buyers to obtain information. The above overview was provided only to put marketing
communication into perspective with the other internal and external communication that takes place in
any organization. 39 It appears that no single study has looked at the use of all conceivable marketing
communication tools. Instead, studies have been generally conducted on the basis of either what sellers
use to inform potential/current buyers, or at what buyers use to obtain information in their search for a
potential supplier of an industrial product. Each of these studies has limited itself to a specific selection
of only certain marketing communication tools. Therefore, the following review of literature will be
broken into three sections:
• Studies done on the promotional tools used by sellers to provide information;
• Studies done on what buyers feel are the most useful tools to obtain that information;
• Research that looked at both sellers and buyers within the same study. It should be noted here that,
for simplicity, each of these sections will present the respective studies in chronological order, from
earliest to most recent. We begin with the studies conducted involving industrial sellers' choice of
marketing communication tools.
In order to supply information to buyers, industrial sellers use certain marketing communication tools,
but even this is changing. Boyle (1996) explains that, "it is clear that the salesforce of the 21st century
will soon look very dissimilar to that of the latter half of this century. A number of forces have influenced
this evolution: advances in communication technology, the ability for firms to reach geographic markets
far away, and the ever-increasing cost of the face-to-face sales call"(p.347). One myth that Boyle begins
to argue against is that "personal selling should be the primary promotional tool for the industrial
firm"(p. 348). Wotruba (1996) agrees with this shift in industrial selling by adding that, like most other
areas of business, industrial selling "is being transformed by many new ideas and practices," including
the emergence of relationship marketing.
Turnbull (1974) stated that, at that time, field research showed that expenditure on marketing
communications was very low, and that personal influence channels were predominate over other
channels in the industrial (raw material) industry. In a study of producers of ferrous components that
examined the ways in which these industrial sellers communicated with their markets, a final sample of
13 companies were used for interviews. These companies, in a total of 45 separate, semi-structured
interviews, revealed that they did indeed use a number of different marketing communication tools to
communicate with buyers.
The tools revealed included all of the formal communication activities, such as sales representation,
quotations, advertising, direct mail, etc. Data was collected about the relative importance of the
individual channels used by each company. First, information on the expenditure on each channel was
completed. Then an attitude survey was carried out involving the rating of different channels. Results,
presented via sample means for each marketing communication tool revealed the following
expenditures, as a percentage of the marketing communication budget, on various marketing
communication tools Turnbull (1974) found that personal communications were perceived to be of far
greater importance to industrial sellers. However, as he pointed out, these rankings are as seen by the
suppliers and not as by the customers. He then points to a study by Luffman (1973), carried out on
buyers within the same industry. Luffman found that there are indeed differences in the views of the
suppliers and the customers on the importance of the various marketing communication channels.
Luffman added that it was also worth noting that buyer preferences of information were found to vary
according to the buying situation.
In conclusion, Turnbull states that there is, among a number of studies around that time (e.g. Buckner,
1967; McGraw-Hill, 1965), contradictory evidence about the relative importance of impersonal channels.
He admits that this is due probably because of differences in the markets, products, and research
methodologies used. He said that many of the other studies also looked at the buyer side, and suppliers
may be simply failing to recognize and utilize specific channels of communication. "A particularly
important finding was the failure of companies to understand that buyers may have different
communication needs and channel preferences at different stages in the buying process, and in different
industries (Turnbull, 1974,p.308). In research conducted on the role of industrial trade shows for sellers,
Banting and Blenkhorn (1974) found a decreasing usage of this marketing communication tool. Through
a ten-page questionnaire completed by 255 respondents in three different industrial trade shows, they
obtained a ranking of nine marketing communication tools from exhibitors.
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